A sketch is preparing, as requested in your note of the 13th instant, for locating the stable in connection with the Estate Office at Biltmore Village. I do not like it and shall send it only as the best that we can propose with the position which has been given the office. (It is enclosed.)

The position of the office was laid down in my absence, under [763]

instructions of Mr. Hunt, who stated that it had been fixed by Mr. Vanderbilt. In planning the Village, I had in view a different, and, as I think, a better arrangement.

I write this only that if the office is fixed as it appears to be, you may, if you can contrive it, find a better arrangement than we shall propose for the stable and shed.

I should have advised that the office be put as near as practicable to the station, so that people arriving by train, and having business with any part of the Estate, would at once get their necessary instructions and proceed by one street or another, as they might be directed. The center of the village; the center of business for the Estate and for all the country about it, ought not to be the Hendersonville Road. It ought to be the new public place which would place it in due relation to the Station, the Church, the Hotel which will be built, and with the Office—all to be entered from the public place; i. e. the common center, planned to be spacious and convenient as a center. Put your office where I understand it has now been fixed and it will not be the center of business for the Biltmore Estate but a half way house between Ashville and Hendersonville. Biltmore should have its own centre and it should be spacious and symmetrical and in that centre the office of the Estate should be. It should not be on a thoroughfare that does not belong to the Estate and which has been laid out without any reference to the Estate. These are what I had supposed to be Mr Vanderbilt’s views, while the plan of placing the Office which I am [764]told has been adopted by him is inconsistent with what I understood to be his instructions to me.

Yours faithfully