Ahead of you rises the Grove Park Inn, its long stone facade clinging to the western slope of Sunset Mountain above Asheville, North Carolina. Built in the Arts and Crafts style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the inn sprawls across 140 acres and today contains 513 guest rooms, 10 restaurants and bars, an 18-hole golf course, a subterranean spa, 42 meeting rooms, two ballrooms, two swimming pools, and nine tennis courts. It has been visited by various Presidents of the United States and is a member of the Historic Hotels of America program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The story began when Edwin Wiley Grove and his son-in-law Fred Seely bought roughly 400 acres near Sunset Mountain in 1909 to build a grand hotel. After rejecting plans from several prominent architects, Seely—who had no formal training in construction or architecture—sketched the design Grove approved. Workers lived in tents on the job site, and the hotel was built in less than a year.
It opened on July 12, 1913, with Acting U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan delivering the keynote speech. The original inn had 156 guest rooms. Beyond its walls, the Blue Ridge Mountains fall away, ridge after ridge, toward the horizon.