Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

asheville

asheville

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

The UNC-Asheville Cheerleaders perform during their game with Liberty at the 2016 Big South Baskeball Tournament at the Gore Arena on the Campus of Campbell University

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

asheville - november 2015

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

Asheville, NC

Asheville, NC

Asheville, NC. 081619.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

Verizon (8,500 square feet)

Zales

3 South Tunnel Road, Suites 118 & 119-120, Asheville Mall, Asheville, NC

Verizon opened in 2011 and was originally located here; it was originally part of an S&W Carousel Buffet, which opened on June 5th, 1974 and closed in fall 1981. It later became split between a Waldenbooks, which opened on November 1st, 1984 and closed in 1995, and Four C's Jewelers, which opened in the mid 1980s and relocated to another space in the mall in 1995. Both spaces became a B. Dalton in November 1995 (originally located here), which closed in March 2009 when Barnes & Noble opened.

Zales opened in 2017 in space 119 and expanded into 120 in 2019.

Suite 119 was originally The Gifthouse, which opened on November 23rd, 1973. It later became an Icing, which relocated here in 2009, then became an As Seen on TV Plus in 2009, which relocated here in 2010, and became Fanatics 101 in 2011, which relocated here in 2017.

Suite 120 was originally Picture Pac Photo Center, which opened on November 23rd, 1973 and closed in the early 1980s. It became The Cookie Company in the mid 1980s and a Great American Cookies in the early 1990s, which relocated here in the late 2010s.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

Built between 1889 and 1895, this grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, whom had decided that Asheville would be an ideal place to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate.

The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and originally sat at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been parceled off and sold to help assist with keeping the estate running, with 86,700 acres of reforested land surrounding Mount Pisgah being sold to the United States government in 1915. Prior to becoming part of the estate, the land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms, and was in very poor condition, with Frederick Law Olmsted designing the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house.

Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls, which was attended regularly by the Vanderbilt family. The village also features Norman-style cottages, various shops, a train station, a hospital, and a school for the families of workers at the estate, with many of the buildings being designed by Richard Sharp Smith, who took over as lead architect following the death of Richard Morris Hunt. Today featuring many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, Biltmore Village has since been annexed by the city of Asheville. The portion of the estate bordering Biltmore Village features an iconic gatehouse, which melds the cottage-like materials of the village with the more imposing design language of the mansion inside the estate. Between the gatehouse and the mansion, a 3-mile-long (5 kilometer long) driveway known as the Approach Road winds its way through carefully cultivated landscapes, as well as crossing under Interstate 40.

The grounds around the estate include a walled garden with rusticate granite walls, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house, with a gazebo at the southwest corner of the terrace. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn. West of the house is a grassy knoll, which leaves the views from the house of the surrounding mountains unobstructed. Finally, below the Walled Garden, an enlarged former mill pond, which predated the estate by many decades, is now known as the Biltmore Bass Pond, and has been stocked with fish, and features a boathouse, with a dam and waterfall at the lower end of the pond along the exit road from the house.

The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with an wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side of the house. The smooth limestone exterior of the house is contrasted by the house’s rusticated granite base, quarried on the grounds of the house, which also was utilized in the massive retaining wall around the adjacent South Terrace.

Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.

The house was opened for public tours in 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944, when the tides of war had turned. Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals. Still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate having been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Asheville,NC.

Diana F

Kodak PLUS X

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.

Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.