Biltmore offers a look behind scenes

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Seventy-five years after it was first opened to the public, George W. Vanderbilt's grand Biltmore House — the largest home in the United States — is showing off a new side.

Ten rooms on the fourth floor — including several that housed the servants who kept the 250-room house running — have been restored and opened to the public for the first time.

Three bedrooms, a bathroom, a cedar-lined closet for ultra-fine linens and the hall where servants spent their scarce free time offer insight into the backstairs lives of the approximately 40 men and women who worked "in service" at Biltmore during its turn-of-the-20th century heyday.

"We knew by opening these 10 rooms, there were so many stories we could tell," curator Darren Poupore said during a recent tour of the rooms that opened to the public July 1.

As illustrated by the recent film "Gosford Park" and the PBS reality series "Manor House," the social interactions between masters and servants and among servants still have the power to fascinate, decades after such rigid class distinctions came to an end.

The newly opened rooms offer visitors a sense of life behind the scenes at Biltmore, which was completed in 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt III, a grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping tycoon. A virtual castle, the home was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, modeled after the great chateaus of the Loire Valley.

The house opened to public tours in 1930, but since the 1950s, the fourth-floor rooms had been used mainly to store furniture. Starting in 1989, some visitors began getting glimpses on special "Behind the Scenes" tours, but the rooms remained unrestored.

Now, visitors taking the self-guided tour can climb from the third floor's North Tower Room to walk down a wing of the servant's quarters. Hanging in a closet are reproductions of the sort of uniforms worn by Biltmore's housemaids — a gingham or calico dress by day, followed by a more formal black-and-white dress for nighttime.

The bathrooms, while plain, offered indoor plumbing — still a luxury in western North Carolina in the early 20th century.

"In a lot of ways, the standard of living for servants was a lot higher then they would have had somewhere else," Poupore said.

Visitors also have a chance to peek into three bedrooms where maids once slept. Like the bathroom, they are relatively plain but comfortable, with the feel of dormitory rooms.