Spent most of the day, 7 hours worth anyway, over touring the Biltmore Mansion and it's grounds. My feet are tired! It was a wonderful experience though, well worth a visit even though it is a bit pricey. You start the whole experience by driving several "miles" up the landscaped entrance road. Designed by Fredrick Olmsted, the guy who designed Central Park in NY, as well as the Capital grounds, the numbers for the landscaping alone are staggering. The one that really sticks in my mind was that they ended up planting more than 1.5 million individual plants of more than 500 species. One area, the 'Azalea Garden', is about 15 acre's by itself.

   But I digress, once you have parked and walked or taken a shuttle the short distance to the front of the house you are faced with just how big this place is. The largest single residence in the US, even today, it has about 500 rooms. In an age, 1895, when most people didn't have indoor plumbing, this house had 43 bathrooms. Not only did it have electric lights, but it even had them underwater in the 70,000 gallon indoor swimming pool.

    Unfortunately they don't allow you to take photo's inside the building, I'd probably still be there if they did, I did take quite a few outside. I'm going to post a few tonight and then add to them over the next several days. It will also be easier to talk about the place if there is a picture to remind me about what was there.

So this is the view you walk out to. This courtyard area is actually bigger than this, I just cropped the picture to fit things in a little better. There is still a whole section not seen which is off to the right in this picture. That would of originally been the barn and carriage house as well as the dormitories for some of the domestic help. There were between 30 and 40 servants in the house alone, which only makes sense given it's size. I would of hated to have to dust.

I pasted this photo together from 4 that I took. It turned out better than I thought it would, but there was still a lot of editing to do. There are whole sections of sky that had to be added in after the initial stitching took place. With the people in the foreground it gives a better perspective of just how big this place is. The main entrance would of been left of center in the most ornate tower. To the right of it, where the row of arched windows are,  you can just see the glass top to what was called 'The Winter Garden Room'. Basically an indoor atrium, it was a marvel of engineering and one of the few places where they used wood as a support material for a roof. Most all of the main roof was made up of metal support beams and trusses. The single large arched window between the two potted trees is where the Billiard's Room was. Complete with two custom tables, one for pocket billiards, pool, and the other one some French kind of table without pockets, it was certainly a manly-man kind of room.

Made mostly of brick that was made on-site, the exterior was then covered in a veneer of white limestone. All of the decorative work is carved from stone by stone masons brought in just for that purpose. They were the best paid of all the workman from the different trades. The look of the building reminded me very much of a lot of the buildings I saw in Italy. Maybe not as ornate as a lot of them, but still pretty impressive.

A closer view of the top of the Garden Room showing some of the glass panels. The row of vertical windows on each side of the structure could be cranked open from inside using the neatest set of wrought iron bars all connected together with movable joints. I'm not sure what the main roof is covered with, I just assumed it was slate, so I never asked. All the flashing and gutters are copper though, at today's prices there is a fortune's worth of material  just in that stuff.

Another close up of some of the facade and roof details. Not sure what the roof slope is, more than a  20:12 for sure, I'm just glad I don't have to do anything on it. 

Some more carved stone detail around one of the windows.

Heading south from the main building, and towards the formal gardens the first thing you hit was this pergola-walkway with wisteria just starting to bloom on it. The smell as you walked down the path was wonderful.

Walking through what was known as 'The Shrub Garden', you were on several winding paths that would surprise you with a sudden burst of color when you walked around a bunch of trees.

    Will continue with additional pictures tomorrow when it's not 12:30 and I'm not falling asleep.