Looking Back at President Jimmy Carter’s White House

Photo: Warren K Leffler/US News and World Report Magazine Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

President Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at the age of 100. And though it has been decades since the 39th president lived in the White House, it is worth looking back at how his single term, from 1977 to 1981, shaped the famous home. White House residents leave aesthetic legacies that tend to last but an instant, their decors admired for four years or eight years, and then erased. Some are widely known and broadly emulated, such as the French-style interiors that Stéphane Boudin wrought for President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy. Others are little known and make no impact beyond the White House and its four walls. Arguably, such is the case of the interior decoration that was installed at the White House under Carter.

“Marking their territory is a presidential prerogative, and the Carter legacy was downhome: I’m your good friend, salt of the earth,” says Patrick Phillips-Schrock, the author of The White House: An Illustrated Architectural History (McFarland & Company, 2013), during a FaceTime conversation from his home in Lisbon, Portugal, where he and his husband retired. That doesn’t mean that the former president and his wife, Rosalynn, didn’t appreciate the grandeur that they had inherited, electorally speaking. The state rooms on the main floor of the White House, which had been decorated during the Nixon Administration, under the dictatorial direction of White House curator Clement Conger, were still in fine condition when the Carters took up residence. “Thus, Mrs. Carter didn’t see the need to change much in those spaces,” Phillips-Schrock explains, “other than moving paintings and shifting objects to different positions, ones that pleased her eye more. She saw to the good maintenance of the rooms, and the fact that Conger had ordered double amounts of fabric when the rooms were redone for the Nixons made her job easier. Interestingly, though, Nancy Reagan, who became the next first lady, thought the house was very dirty and needing cleaning. That was a very political statement, to my mind.”

Surprisingly, similarly uncomfortable comments and actions cast a bit of a pall over the Carters’ early days as president and first lady. As Scott Kaufman’s 2007 biography of Rosalynn Carter recounts, “The New York State Historical Association wanted back its portrait of Abigail Adams that had hung in the Red Room for fifteen years, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art repossessed some other paintings. Then, in mid-1977, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd asked to move the second-floor Treaty Room chandelier to one of his offices.” Conger refused, Byrd fumed, and, ultimately, the chandelier issue sparked so many irritable feelings that Mrs. Carter gave in and sent the light fixture to Capitol Hill. As for household illumination, a Washington Post profile of the Carters and their decors noted that the first lady “is a woman who notices and cares about small housekeeping details.” On a tour of the private quarters, she “was annoyed to find a bulb burned out in the hall. And she was really unhappy when she saw someone had plopped a Ping-Pong table top over the pool table [in the solarium] without removing the pool table cover.”

As with most White House occupants, the Carters’ personal taste was almost entirely felt in the so-called residence, the private spaces that first families occupy on the second and third floors: bedrooms, bathrooms, sitting rooms, studies, and the like. The work was overseen by E. Wayne Dean, an award-winning Georgia decorator, alumnus of Florida’s Ringling School of Art, and former corporate designer for a mobile home manufacturer. (He would also decorate a house for President Carter’s sister Ruth Stapleton.) At the White House, Dean often found himself discussing the projects with the president’s daughter-in-law Annette Carter, who had degreed in interior design at the University of Georgia and was married to the Carters’ son Jeff. When interviewed about landing the White House commission, Dean admitted, “I didn’t get the full magnitude or importance of it until my minister said, ‘Do you realize this woman could have anyone in the world do this?’ Then I think I got it in proper perspective.”

Many observers remain impressed by the Carters’ decision to install solar panels on the roof of the White House as a symbol of his clean-energy initiative—they also installed a wood-burning stove in the private quarters—but some domestic decisions still rile others, largely on personal-taste grounds. One was to rusticate a third-floor guest bedroom, paneling one wall with knotty wood planks from an old barn on a farm that had been owned by Mrs. Carter’s grandfather. “That room really speaks to Carter’s downhome persona, and to their determination to create a space that meant something deeply personal to them but which would surely be removed by a later president and first lady,” says Phillips-Schrock, who posted photographs of the earth-tone bedroom on the White House by Design page on Facebook. Indeed, the board bedroom vanished in just a couple of years, removed by Nancy Reagan and her interior decorator, Ted Graber.

Carter changes were made to the West Bedroom, too, a space that is traditionally used by first ladies, but which would be shared by the Carters, as well as the Fords before them. Much of the bedroom’s Nixon decor was returned, the most significant change being the replacement of the Fords’ king-size bed with a historic canopy bed from the White House collection. As for the East Bedroom, typically designated for the slumber of the serving president, it became President Carter’s personal study, after having been used by the Fords as a sitting room. First daughter Amy Carter, the youngest of the Carters’ four children, used her bedroom and sitting room’s existing Nixon decor until 1979, when she became a teenager and a sprightlier setting—a color scheme of blue, toast, and melon, patterned and plain chintzes, ruffled curtains and shams, and a scalloped coverlet—was required. Even then, Phillips-Schrock points out, Amy’s furnishings consisted largely of “borrowed pieces from various rooms,” such as a sofa once used by Caroline Kennedy.

Indeed, much of the existing residential decor was simply refreshed or thoughtfully augmented by the cost-conscious Carters, except for the solarium, an octagonal rooftop retreat with a sweeping view of Washington, DC. That space became a family room, as Scott Kaufman’s biography recounts, with an octagonal Lucite table at its center, an assortment of Spanish chairs painted blue, and striped faille upholstery. Described in a news report as “a seven-foot breakfront-type piece, made from moldings collected in South Carolina,” the television cabinet was custom-made by the White House carpentry shop. As “We stay here so much. The children the most,” Rosalynn Carter told The Washington Post. “We come up here on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons. Sometimes Jimmy and I eat up here. But not much. The children eat here when we have guests on the second floor.” And by children, she meant some of her grandchildren, who lived in the White House with their parents, as well as Amy.

Downhome, cozy, recycled, and sensitive are terms that pretty much describe the Carters’ approach to their temporary digs in the nation’s capital. That being said, Rosalynn Carter, with curator Conger, did spearhead a White House endowment fund to raise $10 million that would go toward restoration projects. She also acquired a number of treasures for the permanent collection, such as a Jean-Antoine Houdon bust of Benjamin Franklin and a portrait of Andrew Jackson, adding them to a White House collection of such breadth and depth that she once described it as “a post-graduate course for me, because we had a major collection of antiques in the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta.”

Phillips-Schrock points out a particularly regal Carter acquisition: the return and restoration of two Pierre-Antoine Bellangé gilded-beech sofas that were part of a 53-piece Bellangé order for the Blue Room by President James Monroe in 1817. (They had been sold off by President Buchanan in 1860.) During the refurbishment of the White House by first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Paris decorator Stéphane Boudin, one of the Bellangé sofas had been offered on loan by its owner, but “Boudin had rejected it, saying there was no room,” Phillips-Schrock says. “The Carters got it, after which it took several years to conserve, and in 1981, the Reagans added it to the state-room decors.” That Bellangé sofa and its seating mates were exactingly restored by the White House Historical Association—the work started during the Obama Administration and was completed during the Trump years—and unveiled to the public in 2018. They are prime examples of how presidents may come and go, but what they bring to the White House remains forever a part of its fabric. At least, until the next redecoration.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest