For Your Home, From Our Gardens

The Biltmore Floral Team created a pair of stunning floral arrangements to brighten up our For Your Home  booth at a recent wedding show. The talented team members crafted the arrangements to feature greenery from Biltmore’s historic gardens as well as gorgeous flowers.

The results were so beautiful that we asked Biltmore Floral Design Manager Cathy Barnhardt to share her expert “how-to” tips and suggestions for bringing the outdoors indoors with a similar arrangement for your own home.

Bring the outdoors in

“First of all,” Cathy said, “these arrangements showcase a great mix of ‘florist flowers’ as well as greens cut straight from our gardens.”

To highlight the feeling and the fragrance of spring, Cathy and her team chose blue delphinium, deliciously-scented white stock, some lovely cream ‘Virginia’ roses, and a handful of tulips. The greenery was all gathered from the gardens at Biltmore.

“If you have access to a garden or wooded area, this is a great way to bring the outdoors into your arrangements and your home, and it makes it even more personal that you provided the greenery yourself rather than choosing it from a flower shop.”

“To really highlight the outdoor feeling,” said Cathy, “we used long tendrils of ivy, snips of rosemary from the herb garden, a few fern fronds, and even some pieces of red twig dogwood. This mix of textures helps us create an arrangement that is both elegant and richly textured, much like the feel of a cottage garden.”

Ready to try it at home?

“The most helpful trick in this kind of arrangement is to remember how things grow naturally in the garden,” Cathy explained. “Place your flowers in groups or clusters rather than scattering them throughout the arrangement. That will give it style, but it will still feel organic and natural.”

Behind the scenes

“One of the most fun ‘perks’ my team enjoys,” Cathy told us, “is having cutting privileges in the historic gardens and natural areas around Biltmore. Any time of year, we can find something interesting to include in our arrangements that comes directly from the estate and reflects both the current season and elements of the original landscape design.”

For Darren Poupore, Chief Curator, trying to select just one thing as his favorite “is like picking your favorite child.”

His job involves researching and interpreting the history of Biltmore, including taking stock of the history of the home’s interiors, the collections, family history, and the history of the estate and land. He is also involved in planning and managing room restorations and development of new tours in Biltmore House.

That level of familiarity only makes it more difficult to identify one item as his personal favorite, but after much thought, he chose the architectural model of Biltmore House.

The model, located on the Fourth Floor in the appropriately-named Architectural Model Room, was commissioned by architect Richard Morris Hunt in 1889. Hunt wanted to show client George Vanderbilt how his home in the North Carolina mountains would appear—a structure inspired by French Renaissance châteaux in the Loire Valley that the two had previously visited.

The detailed model illustrates the steeply pitched roof, dramatic stair tower, and richly ornamented windows and doors that mark Biltmore’s distinctive design.

New York newspapers had speculated about what George Vanderbilt’s home might look like, so it’s not surprising the first public viewing of the model at Hunt’s offices was a media event. “The crowd feasted their eyes on its towers and turrets, its suggestion of magnificent distances and imposing proportions,” according to newspapers of the time.

For years, the model was displayed in Biltmore House’s Basement. In 2005, a large oak cabinet was discovered in storage that perfectly fit the model’s dimensions, indicating that Vanderbilt intended for it to be part of his furnishings. The model and its original base were reunited and moved to its present location, which you can see on the Behind-the-Scenes Rooftop Tour.

So is this an exact model of Biltmore House? For most of us, yes. But not for Darren.

“If you look closely, you can see subtle differences between it and the finished house,” he said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Family heirlooms are wonderful, even for a Vanderbilt. For Lori Garst, Curatorial Assistant in Museum Services, her favorite thing in Biltmore House originally came from George Vanderbilt’s father.

During her 20 years at Biltmore, Lori has handled and cataloged more than 75 percent of the items in the collection. While she’s discovered many wonderful things over the years, one item holds particular allure.

In the Third Floor Living Hall is a carved library table that George Vanderbilt inherited from his father, William H. Vanderbilt. “I love the richness of the table with its subtle but elaborate carvings, and the fact that it came from William Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue home,” she said.

She is equally impressed with its history; the table and several elaborately carved display cabinets in the room were made by Herter Brothers. In the late 1800s, the New York company was one of the country’s leading cabinetmaking and decorating firms. The table and cabinets originally graced the palatial Fifth Avenue mansion William Vanderbilt constructed that spanned the entire block between 51^st and 52^nd streets in New York City. 

In addition to his furnishings, George’s father passed on his love of art and his philanthropic interests to his youngest son. Before William Vanderbilt’s death in 1885, his collection of some 200 works by Old Masters was termed the finest private collection of paintings and sculpture in the world. He provided extensive funding to the YMCA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University, and Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Check back next week for another inside look at our favorite things!

Today we share another “insider’s” favorite object that you may have never even noticed. Why not make time for a visit this winter to look at the details in America’s largest home, and check back for the next installment of our favorite things!

After 30 years caring for Biltmore House, there are few details that have escaped Pat Ray’s notice. Pat, Biltmore’s Housekeeping Manager, started in Museum Services before moving to Housekeeping many years ago. One of the major tasks for her department happens every winter: cleaning the magnificent woodwork in the house.

It’s painstaking work when you consider the rich paneling of the Billiard Room and Oak Sitting Room, fanciful carvings and moldings in Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Bedroom, and heavily carved walnut overmantel in the Library just for starters! But it gives Pat time to appreciate the details in every room—particularly one unusual item in the Salon.

“I’ve just always loved this one table in the Salon; it can be used as a table or as a decorative accent because the top tilts for display. It’s made of papier-mâché with an inlay of mother-of-pearl and it’s so beautiful,” she said.

According to our curators, this table is English and dates to the late 19^th century. While papier-mâché had been around for more than a thousand years, the material was mass produced in the late 1800s. Papier-mâché pieces gained popularity when it was found that the lightweight material could easily be ebonized or “japanned” to resemble the lacquer finishes popular in Asian furniture and decorative accessories of the time.

While you may think of papier-mâché being a product made of layers of paper, the material used in this table and similar pieces was a mixture of wood pulp (mashed paper) and a thickener such as sand and glue; the mixture was then pressed into molds rather than carved.  

These pieces were often adorned with gilding and inlayed with mother-of-pearl, just as the Salon table is. We don’t know what the scene inlaid on the top of the table depicts, but it appears to be some type of ruins surrounded by a variety of different flowers, all created with mother-of-pearl.

As you admire the architecture, art, and sculpture that makes Biltmore House so amazing, consider for a moment all the work that goes into restoring, conserving, and preserving this special place. We checked with one employee who’s deeply involved in maintaining the beauty of Biltmore’s collection for her favorite thing—please check back next week for another insider’s favorite!

Nancy Rosebrock, Chief Conservator, is trained in the conservation of furniture and gilded objects. She came to Biltmore 14 years ago and is the manager of the Conservation and Collections Management staff. 

Her teams are integral parts of the ongoing restoration and preservation work that keeps Biltmore looking like it did when the Vanderbilts called it home. You’ve seen the results of their incredible work in every part of Biltmore House, from the Louis XV Room with its gilded mirror and sconces to the exhibition in the Second Floor Living Hall focusing on our preservation efforts.

With Nancy’s attention to detail, it’s not surprising that her favorite objects are a pair of bronze candelabra in the Oak Sitting Room that tell a story—if you stop to look at them with a careful eye. “They are a study of the precariousness of life,” she said. 

Created by sculptor Auguste Nicholas Cain, the bronze pieces skillfully portray animals; the base is formed from snails, complete with tiny bronze antennae. On one candelabrum, a mother bird is feeding her babies. On the other, a rat balances on a limb above a nest, about to take the baby birds for its next meal.

The candelabra are part of Biltmore’s collection of bronzes created by les Animaliers, a 19^th-century French school of art named for the artists’ naturalistic portrayals of animals. George Vanderbilt acquired about 20 works from les Animaliers, including the striking Hippogriff in the Entrance Hall by Antoine-Louise Barye.