Inside Trump’s Winter White House
With its 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms and three bomb shelters, the President chose his Florida resort to host Japan’s Prime Minister
OPULENCE: Mar-a-Lago, the European-style Palm Beach ocean-front estate built in 1923
EVER since Franklin D Roosevelt entertained Winston Churchill at Camp David in 1942 the country retreat 62 miles north of Washington DC is where American Presidents have taken visiting foreign leaders for the weekend.
But the collection of dated lodges in rural Maryland was never likely to appeal to a billionaire with a taste for glitz like Donald Trump. Last month, he described it as “very rustic”, adding: “It’s nice, you’d like it. You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.”
And so when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe showed up for a diplomatic visit at the weekend, he and his wife were whisked south to Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s very own 17-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in Air Force One.
The centrepiece of the site is a 110,000 sq ft mansion, a pantiled mash-up of Spanish and Italian traditional styles, whose 126 rooms include 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a dining room that boasts a marble-topped 34-seater table...and three bomb shelters.
Once compared to the Palace of Versailles, it is fitted out with glittering chandeliers, oriental rugs and 16th-century Flemish tapestries. No wonder a site bought in 1985 for $10million (£8million) is now said to be worth $300million.
PART of the reason for its spiralling value is that Trump turned it into a country club. While he and his family have private quarters of their own closed off from the rest of the estate, plutocrats pay a joining fee of $200,000 – doubled from $100,000 after Trump won the election – and annual charges of $14,000 to enjoy the use of its beach club, restaurants, spa, tennis courts and croquet lawns.
The initial rush to sign up in the mid1990s came off the back of a marketing campaign conducted in Trump’s trademark fashion.
These days grand parties, such as the annual starstudded Red Cross Ball, are held in the Louis XIV-style 20,000 sq ft ballroom, which boasts a 40ft ceiling and walls lined with £5.6million of gold leaf. The irony is that the mansion now dubbed the Winter White House was envisaged as serving just such a function by the woman who built it.
Marjorie Merriweather Post, who became one of the richest people in America following the suicide of her food magnate father in 1914, set about creating the biggest house in the richest town in the country nine years later. The pink and gold marble bathroom she designed for herself was so large it functioned as her morning office and dressing room. But by the time she died in 1973, Mar-aLago had become something of a white elephant.
Mrs Post left it to the US government with a view to it being used as the President’s winter retreat. But faced with an annual bill of $1million in taxes and maintenance the government returned it to the Post Foundation.
Now, under The Donald, it is fulfilling the role its first owner intended for it more than 40 years ago.