a family residence and was operated as a historic house museum. Their younger son William A. V. Cecil, Sr. returned to the estate in the late 1950s and partnered with his brother to manage the estate's financial trouble. They worked to create the profitable and self-sustaining enterprise that their grandfather had envisioned. William Cecil inherited the estate upon the death of their mother, Cornelia, in 1976. His brother George Cecil inherited the more profitable dairy farm, which was spun off as Biltmore Farms. In 1995, while celebrating the 100th anniversary of the estate, William Cecil turned over control of the company to his son, William A. V. Cecil, Jr. The Biltmore Company is privately held. Of the 8,000 acres that make up Biltmore Estate, only 1.36 acres are within the city limits of Asheville, and the Biltmore House is not part of any municipality. The estate was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and remains a major tourist attraction in western North Carolina, with 1.4 million visitors each year. Since the death of William A. V. Cecil in October 2017 and his wife Mimi Cecil in November, their daughter Dini Pickering has served as board chair and their son Bill Cecil as CEO. The house is assessed at $157.2 million, although due to an agricultural deferment, county property taxes are paid on only $79.1 million. Architecture Vanderbilt commissioned prominent New York architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had previously designed houses for various Vanderbilt family members, to design the house in the Châteauesque style. Hunt used French Renaissance châteaux as inspiration. Vanderbilt and Hunt had visited several in early 1889, including Château de Blois, Chenonceau and Chambord in France and Waddesdon Manor in England. These estates shared steeply pitched roofs, turrets, and sculptural ornamentation. Hunt sited the four-story Indiana limestone-built home to face east, with a 375-foot facade to fit into the mountainous topography behind. The facade is asymmetrically balanced with two projecting wings connecting to the entrance tower: an open loggia is to the left side and a windowed arcade to the right, which holds the Winter Garden that was fashionable during the Victorian era. The entrance tower contains a series of windows with decorated jambs that extend from the front door to the most decorated dormer at Biltmore on the fourth floor. The carved decorations include trefoils, flowing tracery, rosettes, gargoyles, and at prominent lookouts, grotesques. The staircase