Presiding Ladies of the White House / containing biographical appreciations together with a short history of the Executive mansion and a treatise on its etiquette and customs - Lila G. A. Woolfall

The Blue Room.—It is in this famous apartment that the President receives his guests upon state occasions. The room is considered the handsomest in the house in point of decoration, and also in its beautiful proportions. The floor is a fine, highly polished parquetry, and the walls are covered with a heavy steel-blue silk with yellow embroideries at the ceiling and wainscot. In the pattern of this embroidery and in the decoration of the ceiling and the window hangings the star is used with graceful effect. Each of the three windows is surmounted by a golden eagle. A feature of the room is the fine marble mantel with its supports representing sheaves of arrows tipped with gold bronze. When receiving in the Blue Room, the presidential party stands in front of the windows, but formerly they occupied the north end of the room. A heavy rope of silk encloses a passageway for the procession of guests, who must pass from the Red Room into the presence of the host and thence into the Green Room. This change is one of the many that were brought about by the rearrangement of the entire premises. During the administration of John Adams, the Blue Room was used as a sort of vestibule, its convenient location making it available for this purpose.

BLUE ROOM

The Red Room.—In early times this was the anteroom to the Library and the Cabinet Room. It adjoins the State Dining Room, and by recent changes has been turned into a smoking room, except when it is required for service on receiving days. It is then used as formerly, in conjunction with the series of state parlors. Its walls are covered with dark red velvet and hung with historical portraits. Its marble mantel is one of those which formerly adorned the State Dining Room, the other was placed in the Green Room.

The Green Room.—In old times the Green Room was the family dining room. The present Private Dining Room was then used for state dinners. Like the Blue Room, its walls are hung with velvet; here, however, the color is an exquisite silvery green. Some of the original paintings which, are reproduced in the White House Gallery of Portraits of the Presidents, also adorn the walls of this room.

State and Private Dining Rooms.—The State Dining Room was enlarged in 1902 by the addition of a corridor from which the private stairway led. This necessitated the removal of that portion of the stairs. The room now measures forty by fifty feet and will accommodate as many as one hundred guests at table. The walls are of panelled oak, and the window draperies of heavy green velvet. Flemish tapestries of the sixteenth century are a feature of the room, which is further decorated by a number of heads—trophies of the chase in American hunting-grounds—arranged around the beautifully carved cornice. The furniture is of red mahogany; it includes two tables, the larger, crescent in shape, and the smaller a rounded oblong.

An interesting feature of the furnishings of the State Dining Room is the complete service of china and cut glass, manufactured from special designs made exclusively for the White House and selected by Mrs. Roosevelt from a number submitted to her for approval. The design is simple but rich in effect and the china is of the purest texture, the whole having been very costly. The glass, which includes many pieces, is of the best American cut.