President Jimmy Carter’s White House
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.
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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.
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