The White House

The Palm Room stands betwen the White House ground floor and the West Wing. As the Visitors Foyer does on the East Wing side, it acts as a staging room for visitors and provides access for those going to and from the Rose Garden.

Michelle Obama meets with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Susan Sher, and HHS Secretary Kathleen SebeliusFirst Lady's Office conference table

created by Peter Sharkey

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Don't care about overviews?
• Jump to the state floor layout
• Jump to the Oval Office
• Jump to the Bowling Alley

• Jump to the Lincoln Bedroom

Furnished in the Empire style of 1810-30, the Red Room—one of four state reception rooms in the White House—contains several pieces of furniture from the New York workshop of the French-born cabinetmaker Charles-Honore Lannuier.

The East Room, scene of many historic White House events, was designated by architect James Hoban as the "Public Audience Chamber" but quickly came to be called the "Banquet Room." The room is not quite 80 feet by 37 feet and normally contains little furniture. It is traditionally is used for large gatherings, such as dances, receptions, concerts, weddings, award presentations, press conferences, and bill-signing ceremonies. It is here that presidents are commonly inaugurated in private before proceeding to the Capitol for an official, public inauguration. It is here also that presidents, vice-presidents, and other dignitaries are sometime lain in honor prior to their funerals. Richard Nixon announced his resignation to his staff here.

The State Dining Room, which now seats as many as 140 guests, was originally much smaller and served at various times as a drawing room, office, and Cabinet room. Not until the Andrew Jackson administration was it called the "State Dining Room," although it had been used for formal dinners by previous presidents. The room is expanded from its original size and is now a little less than 49 feet by 36 feet.

The Entrance Hall is a large, square, formal foyer space, about 31 feet by 44 feet, floored with pink and white marble. The hall's furnishings include a French pier table purchased by Monroe in 1817 and a pair of French settees with carved mahogany swans' heads. A suite of early 19th-century Italian gilded furniture in the Empire style was placed in the halls in 1973. Herbert E. Abrams' portrait of George HW Bush hangs in the Entrance hall as does Aaron Shikler's portrait of John Kennedy.

The first family often hosts small formal dinners in this room, a space about 28 feet by 25 feet.

Established by the Madisons, the first floor's smaller dining room was strictly for family meals, and was generally thought of as the "breakfast room" until 1961, when Jackie Kennedy created a dining room upstairs. Some families chose not to use the Family Dining Room even before that. The Jackson clan ate on small tables in their rooms as if in a hotel, and the Eisenhowers dined on TV trays in the West Sitting Hall, simultaneously watching two "porthole" television sets.

Bowling lanes were first built in the ground floor of the West Wing as a birthday gift for President Truman in 1947 (in the location of the present-day Situation Room); Truman didn't care for bowling himself, but allowed staff to start a league. These were moved to the Old Executive Office Building in 1955 to make way for a mimeograph room.

In the days before the 1902 renovation, the White House boasted of several conservatories on the west side, first installed in the 1850s. One of the major concerns with demolishing the glass houses to erect the first West Wing was the expense of providing flowers for the White House without extensive conservatories to grow them.

"Tubs Buckets and a variety of Lumber" cluttered Room 17 of the basement in February 1801, according to the first official White House inventory. The room served mainly as a laundry area until Theodore Roosevelt's renovation of the ground floor in 1902, when it became a servants' locker room. In 1935, it was remodeled as a library, and in 1961 a committee was appointed to select works representative of a full spectrum of American thought and tradition for the use of the President, his family, and his staff. This wide-ranging collection is still being augmented with Presidential papers.

In the early life of the White House, the African American staff and other servants who lived at the President’s House most often had rooms in the basement. Open at ground level on the south, the basement (referred to as the ground floor today) has windows on the north facing a deep areaway that is below grade. The kitchen and pantry together are about 22 feet by 27 1/2 feet.

The Vermeil Room (pronounced vur-MAY), sometimes called the "Gold Room," serves as a display room and, for formal occasions, as a ladies sitting room. The soft yellow of the paneled walls complements the collection of vermeil, or gold-plated silver, bequeathed to the White House in 1956 by Mrs. Margaret Thompson Biddle.

Once the quarters of a fireman hired by Martin Van Buren to stoke the massive furnace in today's Diplomatic Reception Room, McKim made it a cloakroom in 1902. The "Presidential Collection Room" was designated by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to display the growing collection of White House china. Up to that time, presidential china was regularly sold at auction to help fund the purchase of new china.

The Diplomatic Reception Room serves as an entrance to the White House from South Grounds for the family and for ambassadors arriving to present their credentials to the President. In the past, the area has had diverse uses: as a boiler and furnace room and as the site of President Franklin D Roosevelt's fireside chats.

The West Sitting Hall features an elegant half moon window (which has its twin in the East Sitting Hall) and access to the west rooms on the second floor, including the Master Bedroom, Private Dining Room, and Family Kitchen.

Two bedrooms on the north side of the second floor are part of small suites with their own bathrooms. The east bedroom connects to the Closet Hall to the west. This bedroom was used once by President Chester Arthur, who ordered a regally carved headboard, canopied in blue and complete with double mattresses for himself.

Two bedrooms on the north side of the second floor are part of small suites with their own bathrooms. The west bedroom connects to the Closet Hall to the east as well as to the small Beauty Salon to the west. This room was used once as a bedroom by Willie Lincoln. Here, Mary Lincoln lay in shock following her husband's assassination, refusing to enter their own suite.

This small half-room area, connected by a door to the present-day Private Dining Room, with windows facing the north lawn, was a bathing area during the Lincoln administration to the end of the 19th century. Until the 1902 renovation, only two bathrooms served Theodore Roosevelt's family quarters. One was for the presidential bedchamber; the other, a "family bathroom" for everyone else, including guests, had three doors in addition to having partitions only head-high, making compartments for lavatories, toilets and bathtubs.

Variously used as a sitting room for the guests who stayed in the Prince of Wales Room (now the Private Dining Room), as well as a small bedroom, this room was converted into a chef's kitchen for the first family by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 when the Private Dining Room was established.

Added around 1830, the North Portico was added to the White House, in keeping with the Federal Style and the original designs for the building. During the late Victorian era, Louis C Tiffany installed Tiffany glass in the windows, as he had throughout the house, later removed in the 1902 renovation.

Although intended by architect James Hoban to be the "Common Dining Room," the Green Room has served many purposes since the White House was first occupied in 1800. The inventory of February 1801 indicates that it was first used as a "Lodging Room." Thomas Jefferson, the second occupant of the White House, used it as a dining room with a "canvas floor cloth, painted green," foreshadowing the present color scheme. James Madison made it a sitting room since his Cabinet met in the East Room next door, and the Monroes used it as the "Card Room" with two tables for the whist players among their guests.

In 1947, Harry Truman consulted with architects on the addition of a balcony off the Yellow Oval Room. A committee was appointed, and a controversy erupted that spilled over into the newspapers and editorial cartoons. President Truman maintained that a balcony would help balance the south face of the White House by breaking up the long verticals of the columns, and provide shade for the first floor portico without the awnings commonly used at the time, which tended to become dirty. Opponents argued that the tall columns were in keeping with the Federal style of architecture (and the Classical Greek style it was based on) and that adding a "porch" for the first family's leisure would ruin the look of the south side of the building.