Scordatos: The Scordatos Go to Asheville Part One: Biltmore

On the second weekend of May Andrew and I went down to Asheville North Carolina for a weekend trip. The drive down and the first day we were down there it was beautiful. I will have some highlights from where we stayed/ate/shopped in a later post but for this one I'll describe the main attraction. Biltmore...um mansion? I don't really know what they call it. To break up the text, I'm inserting pictures we were allowed to take on the architect's tour so when you look at the big picture of Biltmore, picture me and Andrew walking around parts of the roof. Descriptions are under each picture.

Taken from the top of the retaining wall.

This picture was taken from the roof. Andrew and I were standing on the top tier of the brickwork you see here when I snapped the first picture on this post. Biltmore is the largest private residence in the US. No one lives in it now, but one of the guides told me that the family has private homes on the 8,000 acre parcel. Built by George Vanderbilt in the late 1880s and early 1890s this is a true walk back in time to the gilded age. I've been telling people it was like touring a land version of the titanic. George Vanderbilt paid for over 160,000 acres of land in four counties to build a house over 80,000 square feet and he was the third son! His inheritance was 10 million dollars which in today's currency would be in the low billions.

This is one of maybe dozens of gargoyle sculptures on the roof. I was close enough to touch it. (not that I did touch it, well, maybe I could have but...) Gargoyles were thought to keep bad spirits away. It was also believed that evil spirits haunt corners of rooms, and two of the rooms in Biltmore are ovals, so there are no corners! One oval room was where Mrs. Vanderbilt delivered their only child, Corneilia. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside but it is truly jaw dropping. My favorite part was the indoor winter garden, a huge space covered by a glass solar. We paid the extra ten bucks on top of the regular tickets to go on the audio tour and that was really nice because each room on the map they gave us had one to three corresponding numbers that you typed in to hear the narrator. The narration was good and it was just enough information. We toured 42 rooms and that is just a drop in the bucket. Some highlights for me included walking by a door with the nameplate "Mrs. Edward Wharton." That's American novelist Edith Wharton, who was a good friend of Edith Vanderbilt. I really liked the crazy indoor swimming pool in the basement. First of all there was a row of these fantastically wood worked dressing rooms for women to change into their swimsuits. These dressing rooms were the size of small bedrooms and had their own sinks and furniture. The indoor pool was nothing like you would picture. The whole room was in white tile (tiled by the same guy who did the base of the statue of liberty and NYC Grand Central Station) and the ceiling curved in a big arch. Their were heavy duty ropes on one side that (get this) were for women to cling too as they bobbed in the water because their modest woolen swimsuits were so heavy, they couldn't be in the water more than a couple minutes before they would sink from the weight of the wet wool. The pool held 77,000 gallons of water (but it is dry now) and every two or three days the servants would drain the pool and scrub the tiles clean and then refill it because there was no chlorine back then.

This is the top of the giant "winter garden" Note yet another gargoyle in the lower left hand corner. All the "green stuff" is copper. Biltmore has 43 bathrooms (keep in mind this home was open to stay in, in late 1898 and had working modern plumbing. So you know, after a hard day of croquet and taking tea in the winter garden, Edith Wharton could turn on a hot bath in her giant clawfoot tub just like we do today. It became pretty obvious on the tour that if we were to travel back in time to be a guest of the Vanderbilts, it would not be a hardship for most of the modern conveniences of life. I also enjoyed the tour of the servants work area, they had a pastry, roasting and regular kitchen and each one included massive ceramic sinks with giant rose marble draining boards. And I loved the pantries. There were like 6 different pantries including a refrigerated pantry, one of the first specially adapted by Vanderbilt instead of using ice and sawdust. The canned pantry was also cool because it was filled with rows and rows of ball jars like the ones I collect for the herbal pantry.

We missed out on the landscape tour and took the architect's tour instead which was very interesting. We got to see a scale model of Vanderbilt that was made for Vanderbilt, it was like a huge doll house and we got to get an up close look at some of the features. Here is a smattering of facts that I remember. The copper features on the roof actually clean the slate shingles because when it rains, copper emits this toxin that runs down the shingles and cleans them. The woodwork (and boy there is a lot of it) came from timber pulled from 6 states. Ans as the tour guide said "except for the walnut, all the walnut is from France." All the walnut was shipped from France? Geez. The glass panes in the lead framed windows were hand blown and the chandelier (actually three giant chandeliers of the same style all fixed around the same pole) in the grand staircase weighed something crazy like 1,700 pounds (or was it tons?) Maybe I didn't pay as much attention as I thought. Of all the things I learned and saw at Biltmore, I think this will stick with me the most. When I looked out on the rolling smoky mountains from the second floor balcony, I assumed it was all naturally occurring. But we learned later in the day that when George Vanderbilt bought all this land, it was pretty much stripped bare from mining and logging. ALL the trees for as far as we could see had been planted over 100 years ago to replace what had been lost. There was soil brought in because of erosion problems, and water features were created. There was one man named Olmstead who oversaw all the landscape architecture and they even built their own nursery to supply the sheer number of trees. George Vanderbilt only live there for 19 years before dying young (well we would think it was young) at 51. He never got to see the view hundreds of people enjoy every day today.

There is a rumor that this stone carving face is modeled after George Vanderbilt. The stone carvers had to carve so fast, that they often used each other as models. One stone carving reflects that by showing a grinning face with just one tooth. These little stone carvings were everywhere.

We saw two barn swallow nests on the tour. All the stone ledges were right up their alley for the kind of mud nests that they make. This nest was the most photogenic

Below are some pictures from the extensive gardens. We didn't get to see all of it. There was a huge rose garden and plenty of lavender plants pruned up all fancy. And there was an amazing huge conservatory that had three wings behind the main building full of tropical plants in pots. Enjoy the photos and please consider following the blog. You'll get an email when I've posted something new...I think. These arbors led to the extensive gardens.