Episode Details

George Washington chose the design and laid the cornerstone but never spent a night in the White House. After dismissing Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, whose palace would have been five times larger, the government held a competition won by Irish immigrant James Hoban, whose Palladian plan drew heavily on Leinster House in Dublin. Scottish masons raised the walls from porous Aquia Creek sandstone quarried by enslaved African Americans, sealed with a whitewash of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead. John and Abigail Adams arrived in November 1800 to wet plaster and hung laundry in the unfinished East Room. In August 1814 British troops burned the interior, leaving only calcined stone walls, and Hoban and Benjamin Henry Latrobe rebuilt it and added the north and south porticoes.

Overcrowding and malaria from a nearby canal nearly led Congress to move the residence to Meridian Hill. Chester A. Arthur auctioned 20 wagon loads of furniture in 1881 and hired Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose 50 foot jeweled glass screen Theodore Roosevelt's architects McKim, Mead and White ripped out in 1902 while building the West Wing. By 1948 a leg of Margaret Truman's piano broke through the floor, and engineers gutted the house with bulldozers, rebuilding it inside a steel frame for about $5.7 million. Jacqueline Kennedy later curated period rooms with Stephane Boudin and won 1961 legislation declaring the historic areas a museum.

• Why the "painted white to hide scorch marks" story is false: the house was called the White House in 1811
• The three objects recovered from the 1814 looting, including James Madison's medicine chest taken by a Royal Navy officer
• The disputed link between the south portico and the Chateau de Rastignac drawings Jefferson saw in 1789
• Security breaches: a stolen helicopter on the South Lawn in 1974, a Cessna crash in 1994, and a drone in 2015
• The 2025 to 2026 East Wing demolition for a state ballroom above a new emergency operations bunker