The White House Rose Garden’s Mar-a-Lago-style renovation continues in the form of new yellow-and-white striped umbrellas following the installation of concrete pavers earlier this week.
The umbrellas are attached to the patio furniture that now occupies part of the garden and, as CBS News’ senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs noted in an X post, they closely resemble the umbrellas found poolside at Mar-a-Lago.
Reports that President Donald Trump was considering transforming the iconic Rose Garden to more closely resemble his Palm Beach resort have been circulating since February. Other changes Trump has planned for the White House include a new $200 million ballroom in the East Wing, and a freshly gilded Oval Office.
Much of the Rose Garden renovations were unveiled last week, however at the time, the furniture was missing the striped umbrella addition.
The new, Mar-a-Lago-style Rose Garden patio features the White House emblem along its perimeter. Trump hailed the “very white” new look after unveiling the new concrete patio. “It’s a beautiful white stone and it’s a stone that’s the same color as the White House itself,” Trump said. “And because it’s very white, it’s going to reflect the heat and it’s not going to be very hot. Yeah, we’ve got great reviews of the Rose Garden.”
In a March interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump explained that his reasoning for installing a concrete patio was to make life easier for guests wearing high heels.
“What was happening is, that’s supposed to have events. Every event you have, it’s soaking wet,” Trump said, adding “It’s soaking wet... and the women with the high heels, it’s just too much.”
Speaking to reporters last week, Trump doubled down on this rationale, telling them, “It’d take three, four, five days for it to dry out, and we couldn‘t use it for really the intended purpose.”
“So whether they had events or they had news conferences, we couldn‘t use it,” he added.
The president also told reporters, “We’re getting great reviews on the Rose Garden,” without specifying who exactly had complimented the renovated garden.
Davis Ingle, a spokesperson for the White House, told the Daily Beast, “President Trump is a builder at heart, and wants to make the White House as exceptional as possible for generations of Americans to come.”
”The renovation of the Rose Garden is just one of many projects the President is undertaking to improve the White House complex and make it even more beautiful.”
The renovation is the most dramatic transformation the Rose Garden has seen since it was redesigned by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and horticulturalist Bunny Mellon in the early 1960s.
That renovation established the familiar layout of the Rose Garden, inspired by a state visit President Kennedy took to Europe. While subsequent first ladies have added their own touches to the garden, including planting specific flowers, they have all left the grass largely untouched.
Changes made by first lady Melania Trump in 2020, including the addition of a limestone path around the outside of the lawn, drew criticism at the time, with historian Michael Beschloss calling them an “evisceration” that saw “decades of American history… disappear.”
