While public conservatories might have been funded and endowed by philanthropists, fashionable American families wanted glasshouses on their own estates. Mark Twain (1835-1910) had a conservatory built for his Hartford, CT home in 1874 referred to as “The Jungle”. While Twain’s conservatory was smaller and more modest in size, a grander version of the private conservatory can be found at the Biltmore Estate in the mountains of Ashville, NC.

The Biltmore Estate was the palatial home of George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862-1914), the grandson of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt (1794-1877). Vanderbilt fell in love with the rustic mountain beauty and wanted to re-create an English-style country estate far from the bustle of New York City life. The house took 6 years to build under the direction of Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895), America’s then leading architect and the first American in his profession to have been trained at France’s prestigious École des Beaux-Arts.

Completed in 1895, the Biltmore Estate is the largest privately held house in the United States, comprising 250 rooms covering 178,926 square feet! Alan and Nancy describe the details of the conservatory in their book, The Conservatory: Gardens Under Glass, as “... a timber truss with a glass roof covering a sunken garden filled with palm trees and flowering shrubs, It adjoins the main entry hall at the heart of the house. Hunt also designed the greenhouse complex at the lower end of the walled garden, with materials supplied by Hitchings & Company, horticultural architects and builders in New York.”

Today, the beautiful estate offers the public an array of social gatherings, venue rentals and overnight stays. Tanglewood Conservatories, a firm specializing in the design and fabrication of conservatories, greenhouses and unique glass architecture, had designed and fabricated a roof inspired by the beautiful Winter Garden. CLICK HERE to view an image (first image on the page).