Our Story
Biltmore Village, Now & Then
The day we opened the Corner Kitchen in 2004, this house was 109 years old. It was built around 1895 as part of Biltmore Village. George Washington Vanderbilt came to Asheville in the late 1880s. Taken with the beauty of the area, he purchased a vast amount of land including the 72 acres around the town of Best, which became Biltmore Village.
He commissioned famed landscape architect, Frederic Law Olmstead, designer of New York’s Central Park, to design this charming neighborhood. Richard Morris Hunt, the architect for the Biltmore House, designed four of the original Village buildings, All Souls Church, the Railway Station, The Biltmore Company offices, and the Post Office. After Hunt’s death, the job of completing the houses and shops was left to Richard Sharpe Smith who was Hunt’s on-site architect. Vanderbilt built these homes to house the workers he would need to keep his self-sufficient estate running. Initially, the homes were rental units for many of the Estate workers. The first people to live in this house were the Waddells, parents of Vanderbilt’s civil engineer.
A House of Food
Since early times, our house has been associated with food. In the 1930s, Charles Jennings lived in the house and started a restaurant known as The Biltmore Café, near the train station, which evolved into the famous Hot Shot. For most of the past thirty years, 3 Boston Way has been operated as a restaurant. We love the beauty and warmth of these lovely homes that were so carefully designed and built more than a century ago. We hope to share some of that with you and enhance your enjoyment of the village.
During the past forty years, the Village has become a thriving commercial center. Our owner Kevin Westmoreland grew up nearby and remembers the days when it was filled with families and small businesses like a barber shop and a grocery store. In the mid-1970s, Biltmore Village was designated a Historic District, which protected the remaining houses built during Vanderbilt’s time.
