THE Oval Office has been tweaked, in a makeover orchestrated by the California decorator Michael Smith. In response, television audiences and the blogosphere seemed to produce a collective yawn: too brown, too dowdy, too ho hum, they pronounced as one.

It is a subtle redo: The desk is still Resolute, a gift from Queen Victoria toRutherford B. Hayes, built from pieces of a salvaged Arctic discovery vessel. (With the exception of Johnson, Nixon and Ford, every president since Hayes has used it.) The gold silk damask curtains installed by Barack Obama’s predecessor are also unchanged.
Oval Office
What is new? A rug woven with quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and others; two fawn-colored cotton-rayon sofas; two elegant midnight-blue lamps by Christopher Spitzmiller; and an extremely contemporary mica coffee table from Roman Thomas, a New York furnituremaker.
Some context: Mr. Smith, 45, has made lushly elegant, grown-up rooms for moguls like Peter Chernin, the former president and chief executive of the News Corporation, and Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital, as well as Hollywood demi-celebrities like Cindy Crawford and Gigi Levangie Grazer, the novelist and ex-wife of the producerBrian Grazer. Though known for being tight-lipped and protective of his clientele, Mr. Smith was an interesting choice for the Obamas, being neither too establishment, nor too local — too Chicago. (Someone close to him said that the connection was through a Chicago client who was a big supporter of the president.)
Though no taxpayer money was spent — there is a fund fed by private donations for White House décor — there were the inevitable howls of protest on the timing and the taste. Yesterday morning, Ann Curry, the “Today” show anchor, greeted her guest Margaret Russell, the new editor of Architectural Digest and a close friend of the press-shy Michael Smith, by reading a few snarky viewer comments.
“She said someone said it looked like a law office in a strip mall,” Ms. Russell said later. “I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s just mean.’ Everyone is a critic and everyone is a decorator. That room is quintessentially American. America is not gilded or glitzy or fancy-pants. Although it is a public room and everyone feels the need to comment on it, it is also the president’s office and he can do whatever he wants to it.”
And anyway, Ms. Russell added fiercely, “In our business, the client is always right, and from what I’ve heard, the client is happy.”
William Seale, a White House historian, thought Mr. Obama had received a very practical redecoration. “The room has been calmed down, perhaps because it is actually used more than usual. It is, in my opinion, more welcoming to a person entering it who is overwhelmed by where he or she is.”
He also pointed out that, historically, the Oval Office didn’t get much tweaking until the Kennedy administration. “F.D.R.’s curtains and upholstery greeted Eisenhower, and he used them; then Eisenhower marked up the floor with his golf cleats,” he said. “President Ford had the room de-bugged, and the walls were so full of bugging wires he nearly had to tear them down to get them all out.”
The Home Section asked decorators, pundits and others for their reactions to the makeover. Here is what they thought.
Check out what the critics think here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/garden/02oval.html