Presidents’ Houses I

Fifty years of Progressive cultural supremacy has severed us from the riches of American history, especially from our aesthetic history, its deep meaning and beautiful manifestations.  Before being asked to write the National Garden of American Heroes policy (May 2025) and to lead the Garden’s design teams (November 2025 through May 2026), I intended to compose bite-size biographies of each US President’s home in hope of inspiring patriotism during our semi-quincentennial year, this year.  Something of what I intended follows.  Presidents Houses I.

The American Home centers American life, it defines the familial character of our republican nation and is a just cause of patriotism.  Consider, America is the inheritor of the world’s best domestic architecture.  For 250 years people of all places have chosen liberty over tyranny, democracy over monarchy, and each has brought their home styles to these united states.  In confidence, with sturdy Classive taste, every imported style has been adapted to the manner and pace of American life.

More than this, we Americans define ourselves as a family of families who share a common civic home.  Notice the house-centered titles of our civic buildings, the White House, our nation’s capital; the statehouse, each state’s capital; the public house, a pub or eatery; the meetinghouse, a church, and we could go on.  Ours is a domestic nation. Presidents Houses I.

We are neighbors, not subjects.  We are families, not collectives.  We are equal in God’s love.  The Holy Family is our model of living, of being.  We have declared ourselves endowed by God with liberty that we might pursue virtue and thus achieve fulfillment, happiness.  This is our central truth, the abiding purpose of the Beautiful American Home.

The booklet of Beautiful American Homes is unlikely to materialize; I haven’t the time.  Even so, these next months I will share selections of American homes that we might better know ourselves.   Beginning with Peyton Randolph, president of our Continental Congress, and concluding with Donald Trump, 47^th president of the United States, 11 homes will be featured, one home for the President presiding each quarter century from 1776 until today.  Presidents’ Houses I.

Peyton Randolph House, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1715

Peyton Randolph, 1721-1775

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Constructed in 1715, purchased by Sir John Randolph in 1724, the Peyton Randolph House is located in Williamsburg, Virginia’s colonial capitol.  Originally two houses of two lots, the lots and houses were joined in the mid-18^th Century to form the expansive house we see today.

The Randolph’s were a significant British family that produced an American Founding Father, Peyton Randolph, last Speaker of the House Burgesses, and president of both our first and second Continental Congresses.  Peyton, though King George III’s colonial attorney, bravely pursued American independence.  Enlarged by American patriotism, Peyton resigned his position and presided over the Virginia Convention where Patrick Henery delivered his famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” speech.  Peyton Randolph died while in convention at Philadelphia while dining with Thomas Jefferson. Presidents Houses I.

The Peyton Randolph House is a sparely adorned early Georgian home.  The Georgian Style, named for the Kings George, is symmetrical, tripartite, formal; in England, palatial; in America, domestic.  American Georgian is Palladian, its grand Roman elements reduced to the most honest, most necessary elements.  When in Williamsburg visiting the Randolph House, you will want to tour the College of William and Mary’s Wren Building, the oldest college building in our United States, and there you might be warmed by fireplaces that warmed Jefferson, Randolph, Marshall, Monroe, and others.  Presidents Houses I.

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Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, 1768 – 1809

Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826

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Begun in 1768, completed in 1809, Monticello grew with Jefferson’s family, by personal virtue, and by wisdom born of experience, love of the arts and the study of Beauty.  The first year of our war for independence, 1776, while the main house site was in preparation, Thomas and Martha Jefferson lived in a charming, one-room cottage, Monticello’s South Pavillion.

There are two Monticellos, Monticello I (1770-1796) over and around which the Monticello you know, Monticello II (1796-1809), was built.  The first Monticello was unique in the America’s.  The second Monticello is counted among the great houses in all of history, and rightly so.

The Jeffersons were typical of British planter families in Virginia, they were well educated, often better educated than their English cousins, they were inventive because lacking the privilege of the English, they were self-reliant because distant from the King’s favors.  Too, the Jeffersons inherited the customs of English aristocracy; its virtues, excellence, honor, faith in Divine Order, and its vices, pride and vanity.  It is remarkable that Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginian planters retained aristocratic virtues while discarding aristocratic vices.  For instance, when assuming the presidency, on entering his inaugural ball, when guests greeted him in bow and curtsey, President Jefferson extended his hand to the nearest man as equal to equal, and here was born our American tradition of the handshake.  Presidents’ Houses I.

Monticello is remarkable for numerous causes: its rational pacing of the day, its comprehension of purpose and use, its fealty to excellence in Classive tradition, its expression of genius.

Monticello moves in coordination, logically, reasonably from bed to work to study, from cooking to dining to tea, from entrance to greeting to event, from master to servant to land.  Jefferson was among the first to conform a floorplan to a day.

Monticello served civilizational order by enlarging the man who cared for a family of families, and by these Thomas Jefferson brought sustenance, cooperation, and wealth to the Charlottesville community and to greater Virginia, from these to states, the nation, the expanding world.

From best examples of antiquity and modernity, by rules of the architect’s art, Thomas Jefferson appropriately adapted three-millennia of tradition in construction and design to invent a domestic form, Monticello, a house perfectly suited to its use.

Genius, from the Latin, is an instance of the Divine manifest in a person.  Genius brings forth from mind and soul some perfection of God’s patterning, some thing which by its existence manifests Beauty’s pattern and discovers to us a work of beauty, a statue, a picture, a house, a song, et cetera.  Monticello is a manifestation of Beauty in Divine Order achieved through Thomas Jefferson, genius. Presidents Houses I.

Prototypically Classive, Thomas Jefferson preferred “the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years,” and he understood that “from architecture would flow education in taste, values, and ideals,” which it did until the Progressive supremacy, circa 1969.

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For more on the subject you might visit

Home Style: Jeffersonian,

Thomas Jefferson’s Private Rooms,

and Jefferson’s Academical Village.