Every September, three separate operators quietly decide it's time to open their doors, and in 2026 they landed on the same weekend without asking each other first. The Omni Grove Park Inn runs on a corporate events calendar built around galas and finance summits. Grovewood Village, the arts complex tucked into the pines below the Inn, runs on its own biannual studio schedule. The Grove Park-Sunset Mountain Neighborhood Association runs on whatever weekend enough homeowners agree to let strangers walk through their front hall. None of these three answers to the others. This year, two of them collided on purpose, and the third kept doing something bigger down the hill that has nothing to do with September at all.
That collision is the real story of how this neighborhood spends its year, and it says something the glossy "historic homes and mountain views" version of Grove Park never gets to: the public face of this place isn't run by one institution. It's run by at least three, on three different clocks, and knowing which one is in charge on a given weekend tells you a lot about what kind of neighborhood this actually is.
Two tours, one weekend, two different owners
On September 12 and 13, Grovewood Village opened its eight working artist studios to the public for its second and final Studio Tour of 2026, a free, self-guided event running noon to 5 p.m. both days. Ceramic artist Helen Purdum planned to spend the weekend at her wheel, working in front of visitors on a series of large ceramic garden stools she calls Garden Guardians. The tour is sponsored by Metro Wines on Charlotte Street, which poured complimentary drinks while Grovewood Gallery knocked 10 percent off nearly everything.
One day later, on September 13 and 14, the Grove Park-Sunset Mountain Neighborhood Association ran its own Tour of Homes and Gardens, walking ticket holders through six or seven private homes each day between 1 and 5 p.m. These are two unrelated events, run by two unrelated organizations, that happened to overlap by a single calendar day. Grovewood Village is a private arts destination with its own gallery, museums, and gift shop economics. GPSMNA is a volunteer neighborhood association formed in 1973 that has no ownership stake in Grovewood at all.
| Grovewood Village Studio Tour | GPSMNA Tour of Homes and Gardens | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates in 2026 | Sept 12-13 | Sept 13-14 |
| Run by | Grovewood Village (private arts complex) | Volunteer neighborhood association |
| Cost | Free | Ticketed |
| What's on view | 8 working artist studios | 6-7 private homes per day |
The overlap wasn't coordinated. It's what happens when a neighborhood has more than one group that treats "open our doors in September" as a tradition worth keeping.
What a home tour ticket actually pays for
The GPSMNA tour isn't a real estate showcase dressed up as a community event. It's a fundraiser with a specific, ongoing job. Since 2013, the association has used Tour of Homes revenue to fund restoration of three historic public spaces that belong to the neighborhood: E.W. Grove Park on Charlotte Street, Sunset Parkway, and the Griffing Boulevard Rose Gardens. That's not a one-time capital campaign. It's a recurring model where the price of walking through a neighbor's living room in September goes toward keeping a public rose garden alive the rest of the year.
E.W. Grove Park itself, the 338 Charlotte Street greenspace that gives the neighborhood its name, sits on the same site where Edwin Wiley Grove once kept a personal office and a trolley stop ran through. Today it's benches, paved paths, a water fountain, and pet stations, maintained in part by money that flows through a September home tour rather than a city parks budget line. That's a mechanism most people who drive past the park never think about: the bench you're sitting on may have been paid for by someone's curiosity about a neighbor's kitchen renovation.
The building that used to weave wool
Grovewood Village's artist studios occupy a building with a longer memory than most gallery spaces. It was originally constructed for the weaving operations of Biltmore Industries, the cottage textile enterprise founded by Edith Vanderbilt that relocated to this site in 1917 and grew into one of the largest producers of handwoven wool anywhere. When the weaving business wound down, local collector Harry D. Blomberg, who bought Biltmore Industries in 1953, eventually converted the old weaving shed into a home for his antique car collection instead. That's why Grovewood Village today has an antique car museum sitting a few doors down from working potters and woodworkers: the buildings kept getting reused for whatever the next generation of makers needed.
The Estes-Winn Antique Car Museum still holds artifacts from that layered history, including a 1922 American LaFrance fire truck, a 1959 Edsel Corsair, horse-drawn carriages, and an actual moonshine still. The Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum next door tells the textile side of the story. Both sit inside the same 11-acre complex where Purdum and seven other resident artists keep their studios, which means a Saturday afternoon at Grovewood Village can move from wood-fired pottery to vintage fire trucks to handwoven wool history without leaving the parking lot.
What the neighborhood eats on an ordinary Tuesday
Grove Park's daily rhythm doesn't run on tour schedules. It runs on Merrimon Avenue, where Luella's Bar-B-Que serves Grandma Lue's recipes under a red sign that's hard to miss from the road, and where Vinnie's Neighborhood Italian has been serving old-school New York Italian food for nearly 15 years, a Brooklyn transplant's answer to what Asheville was missing. Neither restaurant has anything to do with the Inn, the tours, or the tourist calendar. They're the places a Grove Park resident ends up on a random weeknight.
Inside the neighborhood, Sunset Terrace at the Omni Grove Park Inn offers a different kind of ordinary: al fresco dinner with the Asheville skyline and Blue Ridge Mountains laid out below, a restaurant residents can walk to without checking into a room. And Kimberly Avenue remains the street people actually use for a walk, lined with early 20th century homes under a tree canopy old enough to have outlasted several owners.
The season that belongs to the resort alone
Once the studio and home tours wrap up in September, the neighborhood's public calendar shifts to an entirely different owner. The Omni Grove Park Inn's National Gingerbread House Competition began in 1992 and has run most years since, drawing finalists' creations for public display through the halls each November and December. It's not a neighborhood event in any sense. It's a corporate hospitality property's flagship season, built around hotel occupancy and dining reservations rather than volunteer scheduling.
The 2026 competition runs November 17 through January 3, 2027, with public viewing generally limited to after 6 p.m. on Sundays or anytime Monday through Thursday, while Friday and Saturday slots are reserved for registered guests and confirmed diners. That access model matters because it wasn't always guaranteed. The event was canceled in 2024 after Hurricane Helene forced the resort to close for a month and a half due to flooding, and it only returned in 2025. This is also the same property that hosted the G20 Finance Track meeting earlier in 2026, drawing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh to the Great Hall. That's the scale difference: neighbors fundraising for a rose garden in September, a global finance meeting and a nationally covered gingerbread competition in the same building a few months later.
Grove Park doesn't have one calendar. It has at least three, kept by people who don't report to each other, and the only reason anyone notices is when two of them happen to land on the same weekend.
If you're already walking Kimberly Avenue or waiting on a table at Vinnie's and want to know what's actually happening in Grove Park before it's on anyone else's calendar, Leah Miller and the rest of the team live and work in this neighborhood too.
