Biltmore EstateBy: John Bryan "The most distinguished private place" that is how, in 1893, the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described Biltmore Estate, perhaps the most ambitious private building project of America's Gilded Age. It was only five years earlier that George Washington Vanderbilt purchased the first parcel of what would become his 125,000 acre estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Along with Olmsted, he commissioned the preeminent