This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.
It is the most famous building in the world. People who have never heard of 10 Downing Street or the Élysée Palace know exactly what the White House is and even what it looks like. It is more than four walls and a roof. It is a symbol. Every day, in dozens of languages, television commentators report “the White House said today”—as if the building had a life and personality all its own.
And in fact it does. For more than 200 years the White House has been a living home to American presidents and their families. Everyone who walks its halls is conscious of all those—Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who have gone there before. “There’s a great reminder of history when you live here,” says Laura Bush, the wife of the current and 43rd president.
The design of the mansion is the brainchild of the only president who didn’t live there—George Washington. Washington and his Irish architect, James Hoban, thought the president’s residence should look like an English country house, and an English country house is what they got. The White House received its first occupant in 1800, when Washington’s successor, John Adams, moved in at the end of his term. Though he lived there only four months, Adams put his own stamp on the place. He ordered the nude figures on the mantelpieces replaced with more decorous ornamental fruits and flowers.
All presidents have made changes, some by choice, some by necessity. During the War of 1812, the British burned it down, along with the rest of Washington, and a dispirited Congress considered moving the entire capital elsewhere—Cincinnati was a leading candidate. The capital remained where it was, however, and the White House was rebuilt. With the help of the brilliant architect Charles McKim, Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing—the office wing—in the early 1900s, and William Howard Taft put the Oval Office there in 1909. Franklin Roosevelt contributed the White House movie theater and an indoor swimming pool—Richard Nixon boarded it over—and Harry Truman added a balcony to the back of the house.
Since then, presidents, including George W. Bush, have confined themselves to redesigns of the interior. Not long after he became president-elect, Bush received a call from the White House’s chief usher. What kind of rug did he want in the Oval Office? “George said he knew this was going to be a job of decisions,” says Laura Bush, “but he didn’t realize he was going to have to make a decision on what kind of rug to have in the Oval Office. So he did what he thinks is the smart thing for a leader to do—he delegated it to me.”
Working with Fort Worth designer Kenneth Blasingame, who designed the interior of the Bushes’ ranch house in Crawford, Texas, she soon came up with a design. “We knew what he wanted,” says the First Lady. “We knew he wanted it to be a sunny office that showed an optimist worked there.” In the middle of the rug she and Blasingame affixed the presidential seal, then added rays that shoot off it like the rays of the sun. They finished by circling the rug with a garland of laurel leaves, a nod, in part, to Mrs. Bush’s first name—Laura. “The president wanted his office to be fresh,” says Blasingame, “and we changed its colors. The drapes are almost a bronzy color, and the walls are ecru. Ecru is the color of parchment, and it has a crisp quality.” The same clean and crisp color was later used in another room in which presidents conduct business—the Cabinet Room.
And so, under the direction of Laura Bush, began an extensive White House redecoration. The new First Lady had some advantages over other presidential spouses. She had been there many times when her father-in-law was the 41st president. “We stayed in many different rooms,” she says, “and we had the opportunity to walk around on the State Floor at night after dinner when no one else was there. With my mother-in-law, we would go from room to room, turn on the lights and really have a chance to study them.”
A second advantage was the First Lady’s love of houses and design. “I like houses, and I like decorating,” she says. “My father was a home builder in Midland, Texas. He built spec houses for all those people in the oil business, and when we drove around Midland, he would point them out and say, ‘I built that one, and I built that one.’ And, of course, he built all the houses we lived in. Whenever he would open a new development in Midland, we’d have another house. He worked at home—all his plans were there—and I was very aware of what he was doing.”
Redecoration of the White House began without fanfare in 2001, not long after her husband took the oath of office. First on her list was the family’s personal quarters, bedrooms and sitting rooms for the Bushes and their twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Then came several state rooms and two guest rooms on the family floor—the Queens’ Bedroom and the Lincoln Bedroom.
For the rooms that have historical significance—presidents can do what they want in their personal quarters—the First Lady and Blasingame worked with a team of nonpolitical experts: William Allman, the White House curator, and the 17 active members of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. “Mrs. Bush is interested in design, and she has a very good eye for design and proportions,” says Allman, who has been part of the curatorial staff for over 30 years. “But she also looks for professional advice. She wants your honest opinion. You don’t have to dance on eggshells with her.”
“You only do the things you need to do,” says Blasingame, and Mrs. Bush’s team changed only those rooms that needed changing, where the colors were fading or where, as in the Lincoln Bedroom, the furniture was historically inappropriate. The first-floor Library, for example, had not been touched since the Ford administration in the mid-’70s. In 2006 the pine walls were painted a cream color, and drapery valances were replaced with rods, which added an illusion of height. “The room now has a more open feeling,” says Blasingame. The Vermeil Room across the hall, which has portraits of six presidential wives, also needed a touch-up. To avoid competition with the portraits—each of the first ladies wears a different-color dress—the renovation team chose an understated rug and a neutral color, ecru again.
Of all the rooms she redecorated, the Green Room is Laura Bush’s favorite. “I love the way it looks,” she says. The silk wallcovering, originally chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy, remains green, of course, but a green of a darker and more vibrant hue. Until the ’60s, the Queens’ Bedroom was called the Rose Bedroom. Noting that five reigning queens had actually slept there, Jacqueline Kennedy gave it its current, more regal title. “The room was perfectly fine,” says Blasingame, “but the walls were starting to gray a little bit, and the chairs were going threadbare.” Though they retained the basic palette, the redecorators chose a stronger pink for the walls, and they installed higher, broader draperies, more in keeping with the size of the room.
New also are reading lights on either side of the bed. “George and I read in bed,” says Mrs. Bush, “and so we’re very aware of having good lamps. And I also have a mother-in-law who stays now in these guest bedrooms and will be perfectly frank about what she would like in the rooms and what she wouldn’t.”
The Lincoln Bedroom was never, in fact, Lincoln’s bedroom. It was his office, where he met with his cabinet, where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves and where he made the decisions that saved the Union during the Civil War. So it is, whatever its title, a national shrine, four walls that hold memories of the best of America, its decency and humanity as well as its wealth and power. To honor those memories, Harry Truman named it Lincoln’s Bedroom, and he ordered it filled with furniture from Lincoln’s time.
The problem was that not everything really came from Lincoln’s time—the 1850s and 1860s—and the room, to an objective eye, appeared cluttered and visually confusing. The Bush team went to the research books, and Allman was lucky enough to find a wallpaper sample very similar to the original. “Of all the rooms,” says Allman, “the Lincoln Bedroom was changed the most. We installed an 1853 Victorian mirror, for instance, replacing one that dated from 1900. The 1900 mirror was nice, but it wasn’t right for the period. We also removed the Truman-era Neoclassical mantel and had one made to match the photographs of the mantel that had been there when Lincoln was alive.”
Plain yellow walls were papered with a grid pattern copied from the sample Allman had discovered, and the bed, purchased by Mary Todd Lincoln herself, was topped with a cornice, a corona, that could be seen in old photographs. Hidden in the purple-and-gold draperies descending from that cornice are tiny reading lights, courtesy of the elder Mrs. Bush, who told her daughter-in-law that the new bed draperies blocked light from the bedside tables. One item stays untouched: an original copy of the Gettysburg Address, written in Lincoln’s own clear and precise handwriting, on a corner desk.
Presidents come and go, and the next president, or the president after that, will probably make changes in other rooms. But one thing will doubtless remain unchanged—an inscription carved into the mantel of the State Dining Room, just below a portrait of Lincoln himself. It is from a letter written by John Adams, the first occupant of what was then called the President’s House, to his wife, Abigail, on his second night in that new and strange building. It reads: “I Pray Heaven To Bestow the Best of Blessings on This house and All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.”
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