“Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place”, by John Bryan

 

160 pages, Rizzoli, ISBN-13: 978-0847818112

I have never been to Biltmore, but it is without question on my list of Places to Go before I Drop Dead. In the meantime, I have Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place by John Bryan, the official guidebook to the 1994 exhibition organized by The Octagon: The Museum of the American Architectural Foundation. Biltmore is a private estate, still owned by the descendants of its builder, George Washington Vanderbilt, but they have opened it to the public and, in so doing, made this grand house one of the most visited in the States. Biltmore Estate is a chronicle of the design, planning and construction of the house and surrounding lands right through its opening at Christmas of 1895 to the present day – circa 1994, that is. In order to do so, the book is packed with original architectural drawings, sketches, plans, presentation drawings, period and modern-day photographs in order to present a complete record of this, as the subtitle says, “most distinguished private place”.

From the beginning, Biltmore was more than just a great big house. Under the guidance of Frederick Law Olmsted, popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, the estate became the first-ever working model of a privately-owned and scientifically managed forest, serving as the incubator of the United States Forest Service; indeed, the 512,758 acre Pisgah National Forest was created in 1916 with the sale of 86,700 acres of Biltmore forest. But it is the house, the 255 room monument to the Gilded Age that is at the center of this book. As designed by Richard Morris Hunt, perhaps the preeminent figure in the history of American architecture, Biltmore is full of opulent interiors, finely-crafted furnishings (many designed by Hunt) and countless precious things gathered from around the world by this heir to fortune. This monument to wealth and property, itself modeled (at least in part) on the chateaux of the Loire Valley, has become one of the greatest and most important houses in American architectural history.