The big house

At the time, it was the largest personal residence in the country, and despite the best efforts of Hollywood types and other dealers in delusion, nobody's yet built one bigger.

There are many reasons why there will never be another Biltmore. For one thing, nobody, not even Gates or Buffett or Carlos Slim, has this kind of money anymore: George Washington Vanderbilt's nine-figure wealth of the 1890s would easily equal twelve figures today. And even with a hundred billion dollars at hand, you're not going to find any 200-square-mile tracts in highly-desirable areas.

Perhaps more to the point, styles have changed, and not for the better. The Biltmore House is imposing, but it's not ostentatious. For one thing, it's a three-mile drive from the gate to the house, which means that the house is not exactly scowling down on the rest of town. For another, with the possible exception of the 70-foot ceiling in the Banquet Hall, nothing is really oversized or overdone: everything is where it is, and everything is the size it is, because Vanderbilt specified exactly how many guests he might wish to accommodate, how many servants would require quarters, how many objets d'art he expected to be able to display. Among the fifty-odd rooms open to the public, I found very little wasted space.

(Okay, maybe one bit of excess: before I got to the appropriate section of the audio tour, I said something to a guide to the effect that having one's own pipe organ was probably as luxe as one could get. The guide gently corrected me: while the pipes indeed had been installed at Vanderbilt's request, the actual organ, a vintage 1916 Skinner, was not put in place until 1999.)

In 2005, the restored quarters for the female servants were opened to the public for the first time. They were not as fancy as the rest of the house, but they were likely better than anything their occupants could expect to find elsewhere, and Vanderbilt apparently paid them above the prevailing wage for their hard work and long hours. What's more, Biltmore's advanced technologies — the house had elevators, refrigeration of a sort, electrical wiring, hot and cold running water, and a complex call system — might well have made life a bit easier for the housemaids.

Vanderbilt's original plan called for the estate to be self-sufficient: Biltmore had its own livestock, its own truck farm, even (during its construction) its own brickyard. And the estate is still self-sufficient: there's a winery, an inn, lumberjacks — Biltmore was practicing serious forestry from day one, and founding forester Gifford Pinchot went on to head the US Forest Service — lots of activities, and almost three thousand visitors a day. I suspect most of today's were as impressed as I was.

Posted at 6:46 AM to World Tour '07