Home improvement.

• Author: Cone, Edward
• Position: Biltmore Estates Realty and Development Inc.

Bill Cecil frets that Biltmore Estate's growth strategy will compound his tax problems. It could end up solving them.

Entrepreneur William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil looks south over the rooftops of Asheville, toward the outsized estate built by his grandfather 100 years ago. "Biltmore was always about being new," muses Cecil, the estate's current owner, explaining the logic behind the thoroughly modern business he has created there.

Biltmore Estate celebrates its centennial this year with special exhibits and its most elaborate Christmas festivities ever. Having turned his family mansion into a major tourist attraction - and a catalyst for regional economic growth to boot - Bill Cecil, 66, has moved into a new market. His strategy is to capitalize on the goodwill and glamour of the Biltmore name by selling everything from wine to furniture. Using catalogs, computer databases and other tools to leverage the power of the Biltmore brand, Cecil predicts the estate's revenues will jump from $35 million a year to $100 million.

"This is a unique property, something not even Disney could build," says Hugh Darley, corporate consultant at Viacom's Paramount Parks in Charlotte. "They are in a league by themselves." Darley, a Disney veteran himself and a former consultant to Biltmore, sees a lot of potential for Biltmore product lines. "The Vanderbilt name is a true part of Americana, known across all segments of population. It has an air of quality about it, and as long as they maintain it, they should do well."

A strong brand name gives companies a kind of shortcut to their customers' wallets. That's one reason Wall Street loved brand-name products so much in the '80s, when Forbes magazine put a $10 billion price tag on Philip Morris' Marlboro brand. Biltmore is not in the league of the Marlboro Man, but Cecil does have a ready audience for his products. Some 750,000 visit his property each year, and most presumably are satisfied by the well-orchestrated experience. With that kind of goodwill built up, marketing costs are sharply limited, allowing the profits on each additional product to flow straight to the bottom line.

Already, Biltmore has pretax margins of about 12%, more than $4 million a year. But Bill Cecil is not motivated by profit alone. He loves Biltmore on a purer level, feeling a sort of, well, noblesse oblige about its continued existence. "We don't preserve to make money, we make money to preserve," he says of his efforts to open new sections of the mansion and grounds while maintaining a scrupulous level of quality and historical accuracy. "I've been enormously impressed," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington. "There aren't many places like Biltmore, not that many Bill Cecils. He has done a great job in terms of quality." That quality, of course, can be viewed as an additional investment in brand building.

Cecil's success has led to a problem, albeit a problem many companies wouldn't mind facing. He fears that the tax man will take so much upon his death - inheritance taxes run as high as 55%, and the house has been valued at $30 million - that the Cecil family will no longer be able to operate Biltmore as a private company. That, Cecil believes, would destroy the special spirit that informs the place, wreck the delicate balance of commerce and culture he has created. "The more I do, the more I reinvest," Cecil says. "And the more I reinvest, the more my problem grows." Yet even as he lobbies the government for...