Dream House: The White House as an American Home                                 

White-cloth binding, French-fold dust jacket, with ribbon bookmark.

ISBN: 978-0-926494-65-7

As the New York Times’ Christopher Petkanas reported, this unique book began “with the premise that White House once mirrored national trends and aspirations in domestic design.” For over a century, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was decorated and landscaped like the house next door to keep presidents and their families living like fashionable American families.

 

Compare Louis Comfort Tiffany’s aesthetic style interiors for Chester Arthur’s state rooms with the decorator’s avant garde designs for George Kemp. Discover why the Georgian-style dining room in Henry Phipps’ New York mansion was almost identical to Stanford White’s design for Teddy Roosevelt’s state dining room. Did department store B. Altman intend for Harry Truman’s White House to be a house with model display rooms?

 

Dream House: The White House as an American Home, illustrated with over 300 period photographs, plans, drawings, hand-colored stereoscopes and Kodachrome slides of the president’s house and comparable American houses and gardens, takes you through important decades as the nation’s finest decorators, garden designers, architects, and retailers—Herter Brothers, Beatrix Farrand, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., McKim, Mead ; White and Sister Parish—kept first families living like country gentry in the 1820s, Vanderbilts in the 1890s, and like the quintessential suburban family, the Cleavers, in the 1950s.