I love fancy places. I don’t want to live in a fancy place. I’m not a fancy person. I like pizza straight from the box and please don’t make me eat sushi or swish wine in my mouth or wear high heels. I won’t do those things and I won’t pay $400 a night for a hotel room I don’t care how rich I get from all this blogging.

But I love fancy places. I love to see them in magazines and postcards and I love hearing people’s stories of fancy places they’ve been. Visiting a fancy place is primo. Living there (can you imagine cleaning this place?) is usually not appealing at all for me.

Then Biltmore.

First, let’s just get size out of the way. It’s big. It’s stupid big. I’m not just talking about the house itself but the entire estate which at one point (before giant swaths of land were donated and sold to make the surrounding national forest) was bigger than Rhode Island and I get that Rhode Island is a small state as states go but still that’s a big piece of land to call all your own.

“Children, don’t forget to pack plenty of food and sleeping bags if you’re going to play in the backyard and I expect you home by Thursday, no excuses!”

I’m only half-joking. It’s three miles from the front gate to the house. An entire village exists simply to support the estate and that’s another five miles down the road but still on the property. In a separate post, I’ll tell you all about the outdoor adventures we had. We got there as the day began and left as the sun was setting.

We took two hours to tour the house and even my bouncy little Paige was enthralled.
Tour highlights include the winter garden which greets guests as they enter. It’s a solarium like none other and is filled with gorgeous, tropical plants and trees. The Vanderbilts’ only daughter, Cornelia had her wedding reception in that room and over 1,000 of her closest friends joined the happy couple so again with the bigness. The winter garden is like that moment in the original Rescuers when viewers see the Devil’s Eye Diamond for the first time. It’s front and center and sparkles like a glass jewel on its own but then it’s also filled with vivacious, lavish flowers that just boldly grow inside like they own the place.

We rounded the corner and stumbled into the library which only holds half of George Vanderbilt’s 22,000 volume collection. At this point, I wished I was wearing Depends. I was so excited that Danny put his hand on my shoulder as a gentle reminder that screaming in a library is usually frowned upon. It was so glorious—the shelves go on and on and there’s a secret passageway behind the fireplace, put there because George wanted his guests to always have access to the books from their second-floor bedrooms. I saw first edition Henry James novels and marveled at a chess set that belonged to Napoleon. George received that as a gift on his 21st birthday. I got a Kohl’s gift card the year I turned 21 and dinner at Olive Garden but who’s keeping track of such things?

I queried the docent but she wasn’t sure what catalog system the Vanderbilt family used though it is well-known that George maintained a reading log (think Goodreads for 19th century billionaires) from the time he was 12 years old. He kept most of his novels on the second level of the library, again because he thought his guests would enjoy those most. Downstairs huge shelves hold architecture and art portfolios and my soul. I finally left the room but I wasn’t happy about it.

Every element of the house points toward beauty and thought. The iron railing on the massive spiral staircase was made right at the estate in the blacksmith shop. So were the lanterns hanging in the winter garden. The marble floors gleam. Well-placed fresh flowers throughout the house make random tourists feel like welcome guests.

Each beautifully-restored bedroom has its own bath and by the doors, different buttons to push if guests needed a maid or butler in the night. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s room also included four walk-in closets and a passageway leading to her lady’s maid’s bedroom. Right out of Downton Abbey, the Vanderbilts dressed for dinner every night in addition to changing clothes several times a day for such taxing pastimes as tea, horseback riding, walking, reading or gossiping with guests. I would cry if I had to change clothes that often.

In the basement (as in all good basements) the family housed their bowling alley, gymnasium and swimming pool (complete with dressing rooms because no Southern belle would be caught dead walking through the house from her bedroom to the pool in her bathing suit). We toured three kitchens, several pantries and a walk-in freezer. We peeked into servants’ quarters. The family provided house staff with private, heated rooms and the stables sheltered still more workers all in relative comfort. The stables are now a series of overly-priced but spectacularly-appointed shops and also a couple bathrooms. Paige was thrilled that she used the restroom “in the castle stables.”

We left the house reluctantly but our tummies were rumbling and Paige needed to skip across that vast yard in such a bad way. So she ran and Reagan and I meandered and Danny photographed it all.

We picnicked after taking the shuttle back to our truck in the parking lot. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting but we relished the quiet and solitude and the warmth of the vehicle. It was a chilly day. I also relished the sitting down part. Reagan and I ate inside the cab. Danny and Paige sat on the roof, feet swinging over the bed. Each to his own. We drove ourselves back up by the house to take pictures and then made our way over to the conservatory.

I’ll tell you about that soon!