Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800 when the national capital was moved from Philadelphia.

When Thomas Jefferson moved into the house in 1801, he and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe added low colonnades on each wing to conceal what then were stables and storage.

In the Executive Residence, the third floor attic was converted to living quarters in 1927 by augmenting the existing hip roof with long shed dormers.

[7][8] The executive mansion moved to the larger quarters at Alexander Macomb House at 39–41 Broadway,[8] where Washington stayed with his wife Martha and a small staff until August 1790.

[12] The President's House was a major feature of Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant's[a] 1791 plan for the newly established federal city of Washington, D.C.[15] After L'Enfant's dismissal in early 1792, Washington and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who both had personal interests in architecture, agreed that the design of the President's House and the Capitol would be chosen in a design competition.

He emigrated to the U.S. after the American Revolution, first seeking work in Philadelphia and later finding success in South Carolina, where he designed the state capitol in Columbia.

[21] Additionally, several Georgian-era Irish country houses have been suggested as sources of inspiration for the overall floor plan, including the bow-fronted south front and the former niches in the present-day Blue Room.

Supporters of the connection contend that Thomas Jefferson, during his tour of Bordeaux in 1789, viewed Salat's architectural drawings, which were on file at École Spéciale d'Architecture.

Others suggest the original sandstone simply came from Aquia Creek in Stafford County, Virginia, since importation of the stone at the time would have proved too costly.

[27] Due in part to material and labor shortages, the finished structure contained only two main floors instead of the planned three, and a less costly brick served as a lining for the stone façades.

When construction was finished, the porous sandstone walls were whitewashed with a mixture of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead, giving the house its familiar color and name.

He proposed abandoning the use of the White House as a residence, and he designed a new estate for the first family at Meridian Hill in Washington, D.C. Congress, however, rejected the plan.

In 1902, however, Theodore Roosevelt hired McKim, Mead & White to carry out expansions and renovations in a neoclassical style suited to the building's architecture, removing the Tiffany screen and all Victorian additions.

[64] In the 1930s, a second story was added, as well as a larger basement for White House staff, and President Franklin Roosevelt had the Oval Office moved to its present location: adjacent to the Rose Garden.

[27] Decades of poor maintenance, the construction of a fourth-story attic during the Coolidge administration, and the addition of a second-floor balcony over the south portico for Harry S. Truman[65] took a great toll on the brick and sandstone structure built around a timber frame.

Stéphane Boudin of the House of Jansen, a Paris interior-design firm that had been recognized worldwide, was employed by Jacqueline Kennedy to assist with the decoration.

[69] In the Diplomatic Reception Room, Mrs. Kennedy installed an antique "Vue de l'Amérique Nord" wallpaper which Zuber & Cie had designed in 1834.

[78] A Carter-era innovation, a set of solar water heating panels that were mounted on the roof of the White House, was removed during Reagan's presidency.

[82] The White House became one of the first wheelchair-accessible government buildings in Washington, D.C., when modifications were made during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used a wheelchair because of his paralytic illness.

The White House includes six stories and 55,000 square feet (5,100 m2) of floor space, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases, three elevators, five full-time chefs, a tennis court, a (single-lane) bowling alley, a movie theater (officially called the White House Family Theater[86]), a jogging track, a swimming pool, and a putting green.

[93] In 2007, work was completed on renovations of the press briefing room, adding fiber optic cables and LCD screens for the display of charts and graphs.

Jefferson also drafted a planting plan for the North Lawn that included large trees that would have mostly obscured the house from Pennsylvania Avenue.

On the weekend of June 23, 2006, a century-old American Elm (Ulmus americana L.) tree on the north side of the building came down during one of the many storms amid intense flooding.

Berat Albayrak, Minister of Treasury and Finance of the Republic of Turkey, visited US President Donald Trump at the White House.

President Thomas Jefferson held an open house for his second inaugural in 1805, and many of the people at his swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol followed him home, where he greeted them in the Blue Room.

[103] Twenty years later, in 1994, a stolen light plane flown by Frank Eugene Corder crashed on White House grounds, instantly killing him.

The White House was temporarily locked down by the Secret Service shortly after an officer reported witnessing "[a] drone flying at a low altitude."

[107][108] In June 2023, fighter jets moved to intercept a light aircraft that violated Washington DC airspace near the White House, before it crashed in Virginia.

On May 20, 1995, primarily as a response to the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, the United States Secret Service closed off Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic in front of the White House, from the eastern edge of Lafayette Park to 17th Street.

In September 2003, they resumed on a limited basis for groups making prior arrangements through their Congressional representatives or embassies in Washington for foreign nationals and submitting to background checks, but the White House remained closed to the public.