Remarkable triumvirate built the grandest country house; next year, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina will be 100 years old - Ashville, NC mansion

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 21, 1994 | by Thomas D. Sullivan

Next year, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina will be 100 years It has aged well, thanks to its designers and the Vanderbilt family, which has lovingly preserved it and opened it to the public.

In 1988, while searching through the Octagon Museum archives, curator Sherry Birk discovered four unlabeled scrapbooks of architect Richard Morris Hunt. The books held more than 400 drawings, photographs and plans for one of the grandest American residences ever built -- the Biltmore, the 225-room country home constructed by George Washington Vanderbilt at the end of the 19th century.

Dozens of these images are on display at the Octagon, the restored townhouse-turned-museum operated by the American Architectural Foundation in Washington. They offer insight not only into the French renaissance chateau that dominates the 125,000-acre estate in the Appalachian Mountains, but also into the collaboration that produced it. Between 1888 and 1895, Hunt, one of the leading architects of his time, worked with Frederick Law Olmsted, who helped design New York's Central Park and the Capitol grounds, to create what both artists considered their masterpiece.

George Vanderbilt was the youngest of eight children of William Henry Vanderbilt, reputedly the richest man in the world. A bookish man with a taste for the arts, George first visited Asheville after his grandfather Cornelius's railroad had transformed the town into a thriving resort. He liked the climate and scenery and took long walks in the forest. "In one of them I came to this spot under favorable circumstances and thought the prospect finer than any other I had seen," he told

Olmsted. "It occurred to me that I would like to have a house here." Olmsted, however, chose the specific site for the house, and then created a series of "outdoor rooms" or gardens, according to John M. Bryan, chairman of the art history department at the University of South Carolina and cocurator of the exhibit with Birk. Olmsted put meticulous work into his seemingly natural landscapes. His plan for the Shrubbery, a four-acre walk near the mansion, directs the placement of 43,382 individual plants, drawn from his list of 699 recommended varieties. But Olmsted did not want visitors to focus on details. Biltmore was to be a place of tranquility, not a maze of trees, shrubs and plants.

To this effect, he mapped out an approach to the house that wound through a landscaped wood made to resemble virgin forest, "with an abrupt transition into the enclosure of the trim, level, open, airy, spacious, thoroughly artificial Court," writes Bryan in Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place, recently published by Rizzoli. "Olmsted manipulated sightlines and used changes in elevation and natural and built objects to frame the view."

Just as Olmsted worked his designs around the beauty of the site, Hunt used his facility with architectural idioms to create a French-revival chateau. The first American to complete the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Hunt loved the architecture of the past. But he also was interested in and adept with the latest technology. Biltmore, for example, is adorned with carved stone and rich wood, but the building itself is supported by steel beams. The stone surfaces were roughened with chisels equipped with teeth like combs. Thus, Bryan writes, "the stonecutters created a variety of subtle textures across the whole exterior of the building that accentuate highlights, deepen shadows, and reinforced the apparent movement of ornamental form."

Vanderbilt, who had toured England and France with Hunt to search for models for Biltmore, was an active partner in the project. And what a project it was: As many as 1,000 men were employed at the construction site, working 10 hours a day, six days a week. A brickyard was created to supply millions of bricks toward the construction of the mansion. To move massive pieces of stone and steel, builders laid in a temporary railroad spur.

But before the still-unfinished house was christened on Christmas 1895, Hunt had died and Olmsted had fallen into senility. Biltmore marked the apex and the end of the Gilded Age. "Rooms the family saw during this first Christmas tour would be seen by millions during the century that followed," writes Bryan. "Never again would there be a group of Americans as qualified as the Vanderbilts to murmur sympathetically about the complexities of construction."