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.”
