Interior Design & Architecture in Washington D.C.

After dropping your things off at the hotel, you’ll immediately be whisked off to study interior design at the Hillwood Estate. Once a mansion belonging to Marjorie Post of the Post cereal fortune, it’s now a museum preserving the art and interior design of the era as well as the landscaping that surrounded the house at the time. Ms. Post had exquisite taste and many of the fine things that surrounded her as she lived there will surround you as well. Guests are welcome to tour the French and Russian-inspired rooms and explore the spectacular beauty of a bygone era.

Tudor Place is a great example of what American architecture and design looked like in the early days of Washington D.C.. You’re welcome to tour the garden and the grounds at no cost. In fact, it’s one of the few such houses in the entire nation to have kept most of its original landscaping. For a nominal fee, you can go on a tour of the house, which also serves as a museum. You can see what true Tudor-style interior decor looked like and get to know the family that once lived in the house.

When you think of Washington D.C., you might think of grand monuments and government buildings. However, Georgetown is just as fascinating a historical place as the more political and heavily-visited areas of the city. Today you’ll be taking a guided walk through Georgetown, learning about its history, a few secrets and fun facts, and its importance to D.C. as a whole. The tour covers about 2.5 miles of historic Georgetown, but there’s so much to see that you might consider walking back through to make sure you didn’t miss anything or check out anything that caught your eye along the way.

The Cooper Hewitt is well known in New York, but its sister museum in Washington D.C. is just as fascinating. It has hands-on exhibits, so you can interact with the design, making traces of it, drawing pictures, adding and taking away filters to see how a particular design element might look against a wall. The possibilities are endless. If you want to stretch your brain even more, head over to the Process Lab where you can see the ways professional designers think and try your hand at their job.

You’d be hard pressed to find another museum quite like the National Building Museum in D.C. Its exhibits detail the effort that goes into making the exterior of a house or a building. There’s even a half-built house so you can see the bare-bones version of an average house. In addition to the average American house, it also showcases the history of movie theaters and playhouses of days past and has a hands-on exhibit for younger learners.

It’ll take a little planning since you’ll have to book the tour ahead of time, but the Capitol building offers a fantastic tour and a glimpse at the inner workings of the government. You’ll get to see where our legislators sit, and while you do, try to imagine what it looked like 50 or 100 years ago. The Capitol offers guided tours, so while you’re walking through, you’ll get to hear about the government as well as the extensive efforts that went into designing the building.

It’s hard to believe that a transit hub could be so beautifully designed, but Washington D.C.’s subway system is a modern marvel. The vaulted ceilings look almost space age, so much so that you might feel more like you’re on an interstellar trip rather than an intercontinental one. It’s light, it’s airy, and while it is super modern, it has touches of art-deco and old D.C. here and there and even more accents of its past in the above-ground train stops.