Page 139 - WDT Winter 2018 japan

or more than 80
years, visitors
Fto America’s
largest house have marched up
its grand staircases, imagined the
lavish parties that took place in
its glass-ceilinged Winter Garden
and, on clear days, surveyed the
unspoiled panorama to Mount
Pisgah, 17 miles in the distance.
A legacy of one of the richest of
American families, the 250-room
Biltmore House today stands in
Asheville, N.C., amid its thousands
of well-manicured acres not so
much as a relic of the Gilded Age,
but as a testament to the genius
of its creator, then-bachelor
George Washington Vanderbilt II,
architect Richard Morris Hunt and
landscape designer Frederick Law
Olmsted, both seminal figures in
American design. Olmsted was
the designer of New York’s Central
Park and the U.S. Capitol grounds,
while Hunt, the go-to society
architect of his day, designed the
pedestal of the Statue of Liberty
and the facade of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

WINEDINEANDTRAVEL.COM 139