Who Will Be the Next Decorator-in-Chief?
Few jobs in interior design are as coveted as the plum assignment to decorate the White House of a new administration. The Kennedys had Sister Parish, the Reagans had Ted Graber—he came up as assistant to Billy Haines, the revered Hollywood decorator—and the Obamas had Michael S. Smith.
All put their stamp on the People’s House, and all understood its unique power as a tool of political diplomacy. So does Joseph R. Biden Jr., an institutionalist who has spent over half his life amid the pomp and circumstance of the nation’s capital, but like his old boss, former president Barack H. Obama, the 46th president is coming into office with more pressing agenda items than looking at swatches.
So, he and First Lady Jill Biden are taking their time—an administration source confirms the Bidens have not yet selected an interior designer. Optics are of tantamount importance at this juncture and the White House wants all eyes focused on Covid relief and other vital initiatives like infrastructure.
“These things tend not to be very important, especially in the beginning,” says Smith, the sandy-haired California designer who put the West in West Wing. “It’s just about getting them in and making sure they get a good night's sleep,” he says.
For now, the new president is settling in, which is not to say that he hasn’t maximized the optics of the home. Biden’s deputy director of Oval office operations, Ashley Williams, told the Washington Post that the president wanted his new office to showcase “the landscape of who he is going to be as president.” To that effect, he installed busts of two civil rights heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Underscoring his embrace of science, Biden ordered up a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, and called NASA for a hermetically sealed moon rock. The centrist President nixed the portrait of populist champion Andrew Jackson, and dragged from out of storage the deep blue carpet belonging to that other centrist, Bill Clinton.
Biden might have been inclined to dispense with the little red button on the Resolute Desk belonging to his predecessor Donald J. Trump, that, when pressed, summoned Diet Coke. But the button is staying, though the usher on the other end is more likely to ferry a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
At a CNN Town Hall this month, Biden said he asked for a little backup in furnishing his new digs: “I asked my brother, who’s good at this, to set up the Oval Office for me, because it all happens within two hours, you know, literally, they move everything out.” He said he also consulted historians, including Jon Meacham.
Bigger changes will have to wait. The First Lady, with help from her East Wing staff, traditionally oversees the selection of the interior designer who'll lead the redesign effort. In the case of Jill Biden, she will likely consort with social secretary Carlos Elizondo, who worked with the Bidens during their years in the second residence. The lucky designer to be tapped for the job will inherit a canvas that’s a piece of history. (If the past is any indication, this person also stands to inherit lots of post-White House work from people who want bragging rights about presidential-level home decor.)
The Oval’s decoration is a signal of an administration’s values and even its embrace of American industry and design, but it’s also fraught with risk. At a time not unlike the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Biden will have to be mindful of appearances.
When Obama’s moving truck pulled into the crescent-shaped driveway on Pennsylvania Avenue, Smith’s marching orders included no conspicuous displays of consumption that could be misinterpreted, and politicized, as Marie Antoinette-like decadence.
“There was a mandate to do everything inexpensively,” Smith tells T&C of those early days, which he chronicled in his recent book Designing History. But tight budgets didn’t cramp his style, and he predicts that it won’t be an issue for this administration either. “President Obama is not unlike President Biden,” says Smith. “They are not people of huge means, much of their life was doing public service. So it would have been very strange to come in and start to do lots of stuff.”
That was the case even in the august Oval Office. In the beginning, Smith furnished the residence using “stuff from Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel. We were really lucky because we had so much collaboration and help from the Bushes and they left the house in such great shape and we knew what we were walking into. Which, I don’t know if the Bidens did.”
Indeed, the Trumps were not so gracious. The word #classless trended on Twitter two days before the inauguration, as news broke that the former president and former First Lady Melania Trump declined to invite their incoming counterparts over before handing over the keys. The front doors to the White House were literally closed to the Bidens upon their arrival because the chief usher had been fired hours earlier. (Contrast that with the Carters, who were so accommodating that they offered to move out early just to give the Reagans a jumpstart.)
Instead, because the White House had become something of a Covid cantina, the Bidens’ first order of business was a serious wipe-down, a clean so deep it cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars.
Luckily, this isn’t Biden’s first rodeo. “They had been in the Vice President's residence for eight years and did modifications and decorating there as well,” says Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to Laura Bush when the hand-off to the Obamas occurred. "They’re familiar at least to that extent of coming into government housing of this type.”
When the Bidens lived in the Vice President’s residence, located two miles from the White House, on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Northwest D.C., they selected New York-based designer Victoria Hagan to spruce up the house, a Victorian built in 1893. At the time, Second Lady Biden said that she wanted that home to “feel warm and comfortable. I didn’t want people to walk through the front door and feel like they can’t sit on the sofa.”
“It was very lovely, very understated, very elegant but very soothing sort of colors,” recalls McBride of a party she attended there. “That’s why I have to say I was surprised when I saw the Oval Office and that he chose the boldest color rug that is in the collection, as opposed to some of the other more muted ones.” (Here’s a free protip from McBride: “Anybody that has a dark rug will know you see everything, every piece of lint.”)
Kaki Hockersmith, the Clintons' then Arkansas-based designer, recalls President Clinton was “very excited to personally approve the samples,” which had been produced by a Michigan carpet mill. “It is gratifying to see President Biden enjoying it now. In looking back, I am struck by the amount of time and access to the White House we were graciously granted by the Bushes over the transition period.” She adds, "President Biden did a magnificent job of establishing his Oval Office without that luxury.”
Trump also used an old carpet (Reagan’s gold sunburst rug) but presidents often commission their own. Obama's was beige and embroidered with a poignant Teddy Roosevelt quote: “The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us.”
And Dubya, for instance, entrusted rug selection to the First Lady.
“He said, ‘Here’s my only thing, I want it to look like an optimistic person works here,’” McBride says. “And so the rug that she designed with the designer had the great presidential seal in the center and it looked like very subtle rays of sunshine come off the center throughout the whole rug.”
Eventually, President Biden may have a carpet of his own. A bit of sunny optimism would be welcome in Washington right now.
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