Recently  my wife Tammy and I celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary.  We spent several days in Asheville, North Carolina. It was a relaxing and restful time.  During our trip we visited and toured the Biltmore Estate.  We’ve lived in North Carolina for 20 years and had never visited this historic house. The Bilt(more) Estate, with the operative word being “more” was  built over a period of 6 years.

Finished in 1895 at a cost of $5 million dollars the equivalent of about $180 million dollars today, the Biltmore House is a massive 135,000 square foot mansion, and features 65 fireplaces, 35 bedrooms 43 bathrooms, an indoor pool, and a 2 lane bowling alley. 43 bathrooms! Mind you bathrooms in homes and indoor plumbing was not a common thing until the 1930’s, that’s over 30 years after the Biltmore house was completed.  It was the chateau and Summer house of George Vanderbilt a multi-millionaire, built to impress and entertain other millionaires. And while it is an impressive house that took over 1000 laborers to complete including the construction of a 3 mile railroad spur just to bring in all the needed materials, the question is WHY? Why such opulence?

George Vanderbilt was a bachelor when he moved in, got married in Europe, returned with his new bride and shortly afterwards had 1 child, a daughter. 3 people living in a 135,000 square foot house. That’s 45,000 square feet per person. For a little perspective a football field not including the end zones measures 48,000 square feet.

While we “working class” folks may find it easy to judge George Vanderbilt for his “over the top” house, let’s not kid ourselves and think we don’t have his same mindset in many ways. This is not about the lifestyles of the haves and the have nots.

Here are a couple of facts about houses and households in 2023.  American single family homes are 20% larger than they were in 1990, but households are the smallest they’ve been in 8 decades. Average household size in the late 1800’a was a family of 5, it has steadily decreased to 3 today. And yet house size, number of bath rooms and bed rooms has gone up. Why?  What’s the chance you need to use 2 1/2 to 3 full bathrooms all at once?

Up until 1991 one bathroom was the norm.  It wasn’t until a 2011 survey the the median residence was found to have 2 or more bathrooms.  Now a days it’s a deal breaker for most home buyers if a home doesn’t have 2 1/2 bathrooms or more. Self – storage units are a 29 billion dollar a year industry with 2.04 billion square feet of storage space available to the public at an average cost of $100 dollars per month. That’s enough space for every man, woman and child in America to have 6 square feet of storage space.

So why this incessant and insatiable appetite, desire and demand for more, more more? Why aren’t we content with what we have?  Why is consumerism and consumption so rampant? Proverbs 30:15 says the leech (Greed) has two daughters Give and Give. In other words, they demand give me more and are never satisfied. I fully embrace the counter trend to materialism advocated by many, “minimalism”,  those committed to living with less, consuming less, and living lives of contentment, instead of the headlong dive toward materialism.

Today the Biltmore is still family owned and operated under George Vanderbilt’s mission of preservation through self-sufficiency – a philosophy embraced before the first stone was ever placed. Whoa, did not know that! That’s sobering statement to me and causes me to reevaluate my own attitude and desire for “getting off or living off the grid”. Is my primary motive self-sufficiency? It’s good to live off the land, grow things, own and consume less. But is my desire for self-sufficiency misguided? We are first and foremost of all to be dependent on God for everything! And to have an inter-dependency on one another, not to live in self-sufficiency or isolation.

• YouTube