Maria Puente

USA TODAY

Nervous questions are being asked in Washington about all sorts of super-serious matters with the coming of the Donald Trump administration, but one that might resonate in the rest of America is this: What will the gilt-loving collector of luxury homes do to redecorate the White House?

"This is the really sexy topic — people are desperate to know," says Kate Andersen Brower, author of The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, about the staff of ushers, painters, carpenters, florists and other craftspeople who keep the White House running smoothly no matter who is president.

"Reading the tea leaves and talking with people in touch with the residence staff, I don't think (the Trumps) are going to do that much, this is not a priority for them," Brower says. In fact, so far there is not the usual coordination between the outgoing first family, the staff and the new family. "This is unprecedented, that there's not that coordination by this point."

Still, it's a clue to Brower and others familiar with the running of the White House, that Trump has other matters on his mind than redecorating, and certainly not anything that would fundamentally alter the historic character of the public state rooms on the first floor and some on the second floor.

That part of the People's House belongs to the people, not the president, and is protected from meddling by law, custom and guardian White House curators and historians, even by the brash likes of Trump.

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"You can't redo the Yellow Oval Room in pink," says Brower. "You have to go through the Office of the Curator, who fiercely guards the White House. You can bling out the family bedrooms and the sitting rooms but not the (rose-colored) Queen's Suite (named for all the royals who have stayed there) or the Lincoln Bedroom (named for the 16th president)."

Michael Smith, the nationally noted interior designer who redid the Oval Office and the family quarters for the Obamas in 2009, says he doesn't expect radical change from the Trumps.

"The house is very adaptable, there is no reason to radically upend it. It works really, really well and it’s really beautiful," Smith says. "You wouldn’t go in and say, 'I want to move Lincoln's bed.' And why would you?

"You do stuff (in the family quarters) personal to you, that makes it a home to you. You add your imprint, your style, your personal aesthetic mixture, but still a large piece of the White House is part of a continuum. … You are conscious (as a designer) of becoming a part of the great sweep of history rather than starting from scratch."

Trump already is on record about this: Before the election, he was interviewed by People, which ran a story under the headline, "Will It Be the Gold House? Donald Trump Reveals His Plans for the Most Famous Home in America."

Not to worry, Trump said. “If I were elected, I would maybe touch it up a little bit, but the White House is a special place. … You don’t want to do too much touching.”

In an ABC interview in November 2015 at his Trump Tower three-level penthouse — the one designed to look like the interior of Versailles, the palace of the doomed French monarchy, interviewer Barbara Walters suggested the White House might be a "step down" from what she could see — the gold and diamond accents, miles of marble and hand-painted ceiling murals. Trump said the White House is a “spectacular place” that “represents something very special.”

Anyway, Trump might not even be at the White House as much as his predecessors, and for the first six months, incoming first lady Melania Trump will be in New York taking care of her 10-year-old son. When it comes to living large, Trump is already well-equipped.

The family has access to at least five other luxury abodes: Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach; the Seven Springs summer retreat in Bedford, N.Y.; a mansion on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; the Trump Vineyard Estates, a 23,000-square-foot mansion, winery and vineyard in Charlottesville, Va.; and Le Chateau des Palmiers, another sprawling estate on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

But "touching up" the family quarters on the second floor of the White House is perfectly acceptable and every new first family usually does it. Their touch-ups are designed and supervised by an interior designer working with the first lady, the White House curator and the chief usher, to remake the space for the new family's needs and to its specifications.

The Obamas' instructions to Smith: Make their new home feel like a home, full of "elegant and simple things," Smith says. "The family quarters are a complete apartment upstairs, including bedrooms, sitting rooms, a study, and they're generally personalized in some way. Some presidents do very little, some presidents, like the Reagans, they brought their own household furniture and redid the rooms to be cozy and warm. There are no hard and fast rules."

Congress supplies a $100,000 budget for renovations; the Obamas opted to pay for their redecorating themselves. Other presidents have raised funds privately to pay for some projects. The key word is "private" — the public doesn't get to see the refurbishing until the first family is leaving, when the pictures appear in some prominent home or architectural magazine in the last month of the last year of the administration, Smith says.

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Smith says the White House has a way of overpowering the strongest personalities, and not just decorators' egos.

"No matter who you are in the world and whatever your own aesthetic and style, there is something extra humbling about the White House," he says. "It has so much history that occurred in that building. You’re kind of haunted by that and it’s wonderful. You're conscious, if you move a chair or change a curtain, you're adding your own stamp and the first family's to a profoundly documented piece of American history."