Courtesy Biltmore Estate
Hotels are a good mix
What also gives Asheville appeal as a meeting place is the variety of its conference hotels. Within a 10-minute drive, visitors find a 100-year-old resort, two luxury inns, a modern resort with an emphasis on sports and two well-located conference hotels.
The century-old resort is the AAA Four Diamond Grove Park Inn, now part of Omni Resorts. With 534 guest rooms and 55,000 square feet of meeting space, the resort serves as a convention center for Asheville, a city without one.
As it approached this year’s 100th anniversary, Grove Park made $25 million in improvements. Most noticeably changed is the hotel’s lobby, the Great Hall.
Despite the 24-foot-high ceilings and a wall of windows facing west, the 120-foot-long Great Hall was dark and cavernous. But when the hotel moved its front desk, it also uncovered three large windows. The added natural light, and additional lighting fixtures, brightened what must be one of America’s first “great rooms.”
The room’s charm remains, anchored by granite-boulder fireplaces with openings 14 feet wide, seven feet deep and seven feet tall.
Many of the original 700 pieces of furniture and 600 copper light mixtures made for the hotel by the Roycrofters remains in use today. It is the largest collection of Arts and Crafts furnishings in the world, valued at more than $4 million.
Next to the lobby, a new restaurant, Edison, pays homage to the inventor and former guest with dozens of vintage-style light bulbs for overhead lighting. Local products are emphasized, especially craft beers.
A number of guest rooms have been refurbished and meeting spaces have been upgraded with newer technology. Retail shops have been opened near the conference space in the Vanderbilt Wing, one of two modern wings added to the 1913 hotel.
Although the Grove Park Inn is edged by the historic Montfort neighborhood and is a 10-minute drive from downtown, it feels sequestered. From its Sunset Terrace, just off the Great Hall, its Donald Ross-design golf course splays out to the west, toward the city and the sunset.
Four-Diamond experience
On the other side of the city, in an equally serene location, sits the AAA Four Diamond Inn on Biltmore Estate. Opened in 2001 on the 8,000-acre Biltmore Estate, the 210-room hotel is perched on a hill above bustling Antler Hill Village, Farm and Winery.
Paths lead to the village and its ice cream shop, gift shops, outdoor outfitter and Cedric’s Pub, named for the Vanderbilts’ St. Bernard.
The inn has nearly 6,000 square feet of its own meeting space, but it also puts groups within a few miles of venues that the Biltmore has fashioned from the estate’s original buildings.
There’s Antler Hill Barn, with a covered, open-air pavilion bounded by grassy green courtyards. Lioncrest is a converted dairy barn, with a ballroom ceiling that is accented by the barn’s exposed timbers. It sits across a drive from Deerpark, whose four long narrow dining areas form a square and have French doors of glass that open to a large, landscaped interior courtyard.
Two other hotels, near the Biltmore’s entrance, offer different moods and price points.
The Grand Bohemian Asheville looks like it has always been a part of historic Biltmore Village, a Tudor-style village where many Biltmore employees lived. Today the village is a shopping and dining district.
The 104-room Bohemian, part of the Kessler Collection, opened four years ago and was built from scratch. Inside, the style is that of the baronial Biltmore, a re-creation of a hunting lodge that George Vanderbilt would have built for himself. Antlers are everywhere — rows o little racks along the walls of the dining room, clusters of racks form chandeliers.
The hotel’s main meeting space, the 2,200-square-foot Kessler Ballroom, drips with crystal chandeliers and gold leaf accents, added by artisans. A 1,100-square-foot salon links the ballroom to the Tryolean Terrace, an outdoor space that can be used, with coverings and heaters, almost year round.
