Hello everyone! I hope you're having an awesome weekend! This week's video and blog post are all about my family's trip to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and in case you don't know what that is (come on, you have to get your early 20th century rich people straight!) I will have the link to the Biltmore's history website linked here.(and here's the actual website)
My family's time in South Carolina ended on Saturday and we went a little bit closer to home but stopped in North Carolina for my mom to attend a conference in Asheville. The main attraction that really puts the city on the map is that it's home to the Biltmore Estate, which my family didn't really know anything about except for the fact that it's an old and elegant mansion. Yeah, that's really all we knew. Here what we learned...
Basically, in the late 1880's a (obviously very rich) man named George W. Vanderbilt decided to build his family's "mountain mansion" in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He, landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, and architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the Biltmore across 125,000 acres (now just 8,000 acres) which features 4 acres of just house. I like to have my space too, but I think that 35 bedrooms might be a bit extreme, no?
The house itself was finished in 1895, after 6 years of construction, and was in use by only the family and guests until 1930 when it was opened to the public. It's not even like the Vanderbilts had a surprising amount of children either! It was only for George, his wife Edith (!!!), and daughter Cornelia, and later Cornelia's husband.
When my family toured the house (if you can even call a '250-room French Renaissance chateau' a house) we were really amazed by the level of detail put into each room. My family has toured most of the Newport Mansions, which are similar houses in Rhode Island, some of which were built by George's relatives, but the Biltmore definitely exceeded those by sheer volume if nothing else! It was an incredible experience and I hope you enjoy seeing my family's experience there through these pictures and the YouTube video!
Episode 51: https://youtu.be/I7xsHLkzP24
My Channel: (Edith Noble) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnXXLYRl1ImCPHpCqeFdilg?view_as=subscriber
Other Vacation Content:
+ Beach House Tour: blog post - click here video - click here
+ Charleston Vlog: blog post - click here video - click here
+ Day in My Life: blog post - click here video - click here
+ Savannah Vlog: blog post - click here video - click here
these pictures are in order of...
estate tour --> gardens/greenhouse --> grounds/waterfall