George Washington was a masterful general, exemplary president, noted truth teller and a passionate interior decorator. That last accolade is often missing from shorter biographies, but David McCullough in his book “1776” reveals Washington as an amateur artificer:
Only the year before taking command at Cambridge, Washington had commenced an ambitious expansion of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, which, when completed, would double its size. He was adding a library and building a two-story dining room, or banquet hall, suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. He was a builder by nature. He had a passion for architecture and landscape design, and Mount Vernon was his creation, everything done to his own ideas and plans. How extremely important all this was to him and the pleasure he drew from it, few people ever understood.
He had an abiding dislike of disorder and cared intensely about every detail — wallpaper, paint color, ceiling ornaments — and insisted on perfection. He hated to be away from the project. Even at the distance of Cambridge, with all that weighed on his mind he worried that things were not being handled as he wished at Mount Vernon and filled pages of instructions for his manager, Lund Washington.
Our founding fathers were a handy bunch, the artistic Jefferson, the practical Franklin, and the crafty Revere, but Washington’s aesthetic pursuits are largely ignored. The legends of Jefferson and Franklin are greatly enriched by their manual talents. For whatever reason Washington is regaled as progenitor president, stoic commander, and gentleman farmer with no hint at his domestic activities. In any case, the next time someone maligns design as effeminate pursuit, remind them that the father of our country was flipping through wallpaper swatch books when not busy fighting for independence.
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