It was a somber, even sad, place. A place of great stress and responsibility. It was a place of dignity and seriousness.
When Theodore Roosevelt moved into the White House, it was not only a little run-down, but it was in desperate need of being freshened up. But it wasn’t something addressed by his wife Edith’s fine sense of taste. The Roosevelts fixed it up with something better: children.
In her wonderful book The Bully Pulpit (available here from The Painted Porch), Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes the chief usher of the White House saying that, “Places that had not seen a human being for years were now made alive with the howls and laughter of these newcomers.” She also quotes an account from a journalist who credits the Roosevelts as doing “more to brighten and cheer the White House than a whole army of decorators, and the merry prattle of children echoing through the corridors and apartments [gives it] a homelike atmosphere which every caller is quick to notice and appreciate.”
That is how we ought to decorate our own homes, which are, as we’ve said, not for displaying antiques or art but for living. For raising our kids. For giving them a safe space to grow and explore, to be themselves.
