George Vanderbilt’s great and grand home in Asheville, Biltmore, was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt.  Completed in 1895, it remains open to the public as a kind of museum of upper class living.  The rooms, immaculately maintained, are stuffed with original furnishings and lavish flower arrangements.  Visitors wander through, amazed by the scale and sumptuousness of the master’s bedroom suite, the breakfast room, the painting gallery, the bowling alley, the swimming pool, and the pastry kitchen.  Uniformed guides observe that the house is most beautiful at Christmastime, when rooms are decked with holiday trim and candles.

I’m not easily impressed by grandeur but I’m impressed with Biltmore.  It’s not the grandeur of the lifestyle, really, but the grandeur of the building’s architectural ornament.  The trim on the facade, executed in a clear, luminous limestone, is especially stunning.  The decoration doesn’t clumsily imitate European models, as so much nineteenth-century American architecture does, but proposes a lighter program.  The reduced area of ornament on the facade and the plainness in the coursing give the work, undeniably profuse, real refinement.  Historical photos on display in the Biltmore basement show the temporary railroad that brought workers and supplies from the city to the site.  Most workers rode in on flatbeds but the masons traveled in covered cars.  From the look of things that princely treatment was justifiable.