Biltmore House is a châteauesque style mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1888 and 1895. It is the largest privately owned home in the United States at 175,000 square feet (16,300 m2) and featuring 250 rooms. Still owned by one of Vanderbilt's descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of the Gilded Age.

In 2007, it was ranked eighth on the List of America's Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects. In the 1880s, at the height of the Gilded Age, George Washington Vanderbilt, youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt, began to make regular visits with his mother, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt (1821–1896), to the Asheville, NC area. He loved the scenery and climate so much that he decided to create his own summer estate in the area, which he called his "little mountain escape", just as his older brothers and sisters had built opulent summer houses in places such as Newport, Rhode Island, and Hyde Park, New York.

His idea was to replicate the working estates of Europe. He commissioned Richard Morris Hunt, who had previously designed houses for various Vanderbilt family members, to design the house in imitation of several Loire Valley chateaux, including the Chateau de Blois. Wanting the best, Vanderbilt also employed Frederick Law Olmsted to design the grounds, including the deliberately rustic three-mile (5 km) approach road.

Gifford Pinchot and later Carl Schenck were hired to manage the forests, with Schenck establishing the first forestry education program in the U.S., the Biltmore Forest School, on the estate grounds in 1898. Intending that the estate could be self-supporting, Vanderbilt set up scientific forestry programs, poultry farms, cattle farms, hog farms and a dairy. The estate included its own village (today Biltmore Village) and a church.

The Vanderbilts invited family and friends from across the country to experience the opulent estate. Famous guests to the estate have included author Edith Wharton, novelist Henry James, presidents McKinley, Wilson and Nixon, and Charles, Prince of Wales.

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