Today we drove into Asheville to see the Biltmore Estate, former home of some of the Vanderbilt clan. The drive through NC to get there is very nice but the estate is truly spectacular. It costs a bit more than $60 a head to get in, which seems a little steep, but the place is pretty spectacular.
Just driving up the 3 mile long driveway is very scenic and once you park and hike to the house, you are reminded that the rich in this country are really rich. The house should actually be referred to as a castle since the interior living space only occupies about 4 acres of floor space which these poor folks have divided up into a mere 250 rooms. The breakfast room is substantially larger than my entire house and other rooms, like the entrance hall, the winter garden (indoors), the billiard room, the banquet hall, the organ loft, the salon, the music room, the tapestry gallery and the library pretty much chew up all the first floor space. On the second floor one finds the second floor living hall, Mr. Vanderbilt’s bedroom, the oak sitting room and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedroom have used up the meager 40,000 square feet of available space. Hiking up the stairs to the third floor gets you to the guest quarters, the 3rd floor living hall (which is a pretty wide hall), the Louis XV hallway, the Damask room, the Claude room, the Tyrolean chimney room and the Louis XV shitter, which is quite nice. We wandered from the 3rd floor down to the basement because you can’t go any higher in the house unless you pay more. The basement has a big indoor white tile pool which looks like a torture chamber, an indoor bowling alley with a human pinsetter, a Halloween room, dressing rooms and an exercise room which has what is described as a rowing machine but appears to actually be a butt-and-arm powered chainsaw. Also found in the basement are servant’s rooms which are not quite as spiffy as the guest rooms, an enormous vegetable pantry, various walk-in coolers, refrigerators and freezers, a pastry kitchen, a rotisserie kitchen, a main kitchen, the servant’s dining room and a gigantic laundry. The house also has a bachelors’ wing with a nifty hallway about subway station size, a smoking room and a gun room. Attached to the house but off to the side is a big stables area.
There are some nice porches off the main house and some big terrace areas on all sides of the joint. If you walk towards the gardens, you will find they are divided into a formal Italian garden which has some big ponds, with coping, a shrub garden, a spring garden, a walled garden, a rose garden, an azalea garden, a conservatory, a bass pond and a boat house.
If you jump back in your car, you can drive to a Deerpark, a place called Antler Hill Village which is affluent talk for an enormous winery and a hotel called the Inn at Biltmore Estate. It is all quite spiffy. It must be a big chore to be rich.
After about 5 or 6 hours of walking and standing around at this place, my feet were sore so we piled back into Charlotte and drove the 35 miles back to Waynesville / Maggie Valley.