During the 65 days Biltmore Estate will celebrate its “Christmas at Biltmore,” there will be over 55 festively decorated trees featured on the historic 8,000-acre property in Asheville, N.C.
One of those trees was decorated by Marietta blogger Robin Gay, who was one of four chosen to decorate trees in select rooms of The Inn on Biltmore Estate as part of a partnership between the historic estate and Balsam Hill, an artificial Christmas tree company. Her tool kit was a 6-foot-tall artificial tree, an ornament set from the Balsam Hill Biltmore Collection and about three hours of time.
However, more than three hours went into her tree. She said those hours began before she even drove to Asheville.
“I pulled out the Christmas tree and shut the shutters, so my neighbors wouldn’t call the insane asylum,” Gay said, while laughing. “I have been practicing on my own tree with various different styles.”
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The others who were selected come from Los Angeles, Virginia and North Carolina, but Balsam Hill spokeswoman Jen Couch said Gay stood out because of her strong use of specific holiday-themed colors.
“She has a great design aesthetic,” Couch said. “She was a natural fit and has phenomenal style with burgundies and golds.”
It’s no surprise that when Gay arrived at the Biltmore, her ornament set was all burgundy accompanied by a thick gold ribbon. Gay said burgundy is a color she frequently uses on her blog “All Things Heart & Home,” namely because it’s what her home in Marietta tells her to do.
“When we moved to this house, it just had that kind of rustic but really rich kind of look that made me want to use jewel tones,” she said. “I have this stone fireplace, and it just kind of pops when you use those colors.”
Where she lives has always been a big influence on her, and she credits the nearby Marietta Square and Kennesaw Mountain hiking trails as molding her style in more natural and rustic directions. When she started blogging about a decade ago after a career as an assistant elementary school teacher, she lived in a “bit of a farmhouse” in Woodstock, which she said had a lighter and airier atmosphere that bled into her design work.
Both are stark departures from her original influences as a child growing up near Stone Mountain in the 1960s.
“I’m still a ’60s music person and a tad of a hippie. That’s what I was drawn to … the stuff you would see on a Volkswagen bus in the ’60s,” she said.
The Biltmore is decidedly not hippie-esque. The historic home was built in the late 1880s by George William Vanderbilt, who was the grandson of railroad business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, according to the Biltmore’s website.
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Gay described the vibe and ornaments she worked with as “regal” and full of “timeless elegance,” so her focus was not overpowering her small tree. In addition to what the house told her to do, she said she also had to listen to the decorations.
“With any sized tree, you have to choose carefully to not overwhelm and just get a pile of ornaments on the tree,” she said. “This was a more condensed situation, but it made it fun. You’re going to do what that first heart tug tells you.”
If it wasn’t for the time crunch, she said she’d probably still be fiddling with the embellished ornaments, beaded ribbon and velvet, glittery magnolia decorations she was given.
“If I had 12 hours, I would’ve tinkered with that tree for that amount of time,” she said, laughing. “But when the time was up, the time was up.”
For some, it’s a taboo to even think about holiday season decorating until Thanksgiving has come and passed. Gay even admitted that it can feel like a chore to lug out her two trees at home and decorate them the first week of November for her blog.
However, when she was traveling home from the Biltmore in mid-October, she wasn’t lacking holiday spirit.
“I told my husband, ‘You’re getting the tree upstairs first thing when we get home,’” she said.
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