WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden returned from church a week ago when he stepped out of his armored SUV in the driveway of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, with an important mission: He wanted to survey the landscape.
The sprawling house on a man-made pond, five kilometers from the center, holds a special place in his heart – some might call it an obsession.
When he met with special counsel Robert Hur to discuss the sensitive documents he improperly retained after his vice presidency, Biden offered a confession. Three times in five hours, Biden told Hur he is a “frustrated architect.”
He allowed his wife, Jill, to once offer to send him to architecture school if he wouldn’t run for Senate again. It wasn’t meant to be. But it seems he still has architectural design in his blood. And he muses privately about redesigning elements of the house after his presidency.
The House is at the center of the controversy over Biden’s handling of classified documents. FBI agents and the president’s lawyers identified at least 28 items there that contained classified information or markers from his time as vice president. Last week, Hur defended his assessment that there was not enough evidence to accuse Biden of deliberately withholding the classified information.
In a transcript of Hur’s interview, conducted in the fall and released on the day a House committee heard the special counsel’s testimony, Biden lays out the specifications of his home in painstaking detail, prompting Hur to comment give up on his “photographic” memory even as he had questioned the president’s memory on other fronts.
When Biden stepped outside to inspect the landscaping, the area had just been replanted following a roughly year-long Secret Service project to improve security on the president’s property. The work included new fencing and vehicle barriers, bulletproof windows and extensive modifications to the home requested by the agency to make it safer.
Satellite images from last year showed construction crews had dismantled the second-floor balcony and sunroom overlooking the pond as part of renovation work on the south side of the 6,500-square-foot house and grounds.
Ceiling fans from the sunroom were stored in Biden’s cluttered garage next to his beloved Corvette in January 2023, when FBI agents searched the home for nearly 13 hours looking for classified documents.
Dubbed the “house on the lake” by Biden aides, the house has been at the center of Biden’s life since he moved there in 1998. It has been the scene of meetings with aides and the occasional lawmaker for decades and the site of the makeshift basement studio from which he ran much of his 2020 presidential campaign during the pandemic.
Biden regularly spends his weekends at the Wilmington home, often from Friday to Monday. One bonus: It’s a quick jump to the Philadelphia area, the Democratic base in a critical swing state as Biden campaigns for reelection.
His visits to Wilmington are a kind of continuation of the itinerary he maintained as vice president. During his three-decade tenure in the Senate before that, Biden commuted daily from Delaware to Washington on Amtrak.
The Delaware home is more than a gathering place for members of his family and a few of his close friends or a refuge from the prying eyes of the White House. Biden aides say he feels rooted in Wilmington, where his interactions with parishioners at church, his neighbors and even his gardener often form the basis of policy questions he asks his team when he returns to Washington.
The construction project, which was underway when FBI agents searched his home, took more than a year, much to Biden’s chagrin.
“The FBI knows my house better than I do,” Biden joked to Hur. A month earlier, he complained to reporters that “I don’t have a house to go to” during construction.
Aides said Biden was annoyed by the pace of the renovations — a common experience for many homeowners — and that the process was made even more stressful because he couldn’t go there for months to see the changes. He wants to undo some of those changes outside of office.
The house was carefully decorated by the president after he and his wife purchased the property in 1996.
“I mean, I’m a frustrated architect, and if you keep going, you’ve probably already seen this significant number of house plans that I’ve drawn,” Biden told Hur, referring to a drawer opened by investigators.
Biden did some of the work on the house himself, sometimes with help from his sons Hunter and the late Beau, and his brother Jimmy. He supervised the other changes with an eye for detail.
“There are so many different contractors I’ve used,” he said, mentioning roofers, among others. “They worked hard for three years to build the house.”
Biden furnished the home with a lot of sentimental items, from the desk he used while serving in the Senate to trinkets he picked up over decades in public life. He has dozens of three-by-two photos of moments from his time in office.
“I have them hanging on the walls all over the downstairs, in the television room and a few in the library,” Biden told Hur.
A small house at the top of the driveway now serves as a secure operations center for Secret Service agents and military officials. But it was home to Biden’s mother before she died in 2010 at age 92.
Over the next few years, as vice president, Biden collected $2,200 a month in rent payments for the Secret Service guest house.
Biden’s wood-paneled library is a particular point of pride in the house, with its chandelier and overstuffed leather couches. There, investigators found his personal notebooks documenting key meetings from his time as vice president.
“I just wanted to let you know that I picked the cut walnut tree,” Biden told investigators. Some of that walnut ended up in the house. “I chose the professional to come and do this; this room took up a third of my entire house. Swear it to God.”
“It seems so,” Hur replied. ‘It’s very impressive.’
Pointing to seven different pieces of molding photographed by the FBI in the room, he added, “I got a little carried away.”
