Ted Graber; Refurbished White House

Ted Graber, an influential Beverly Hills interior designer who decorated homes for the rich and famous and refurbished the White House family quarters for First Lady Nancy Reagan, died Saturday at the age of 80.

Graber died in an assisted living facility of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, his longtime assistant Jean Mathison said.

With a style that a news magazine once called “trend-resistant traditional,” Graber mixed modern, comfortable furnishings with fine antiques from the English Regency period to produce elegant interiors. He would add Asian figurines and vases from the Nan and Tang dynasties to accentuate a room. His tastes also ran to wood floors, simple lamps and good chandeliers.

He began his career in 1945, with clients including Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, Walter and Lee Annenberg and, from Hollywood, Jack and Mary Benny, Jack Warner and Joan Crawford.

For Annenberg, Graber decorated Winfield, the U.S. Embassy residence in London, when the publishing magnate was the ambassador to Britain. He also decorated Annenberg’s massive Sunnyland estate in Palm Springs, which stretches over 200 acres and features a golf course and artificial lakes.

But Graber came to broad national attention for his work with Nancy Reagan.

With funds contributed by friends of the Reagans, Graber went about renovating the White House’s family living quarters, which had not received much attention since the days of Jacqueline Kennedy 20 years earlier. For nine months, he lived in the White House and supervised the restoration, which included such basics as rewiring and plumbing.

He spent $730,000 restoring more than 100 pieces of government-owned furnishings, replaced 18 carpets and nearly 75 lamp shades, refinished the floors in several rooms and replaced the wallpaper in more than 25 rooms, bathrooms and closets.

Graber and the first lady combed an old warehouse near Washington’s National Airport, which was jammed with treasures from the White House. They retrieved dozens of antiques, some of which dated to the late 1700s, and arranged for some of the finest experts in the country to restore them. As detailed later by the Smithsonian Institution, these included a set of horse and buggy lithographs from Currier and Ives.

“We wanted it to be warm and livable without sacrificing any of the historical traditions,” Graber said of the project.

Although the scope and expense of the restoration drew some criticism, Graber maintained that “all houses need work every 20 years or they’ll fall apart.”

After the Reagans left Washington, Graber helped refurbish the ex-president’s Century City office and the Reagans’ Bel-Air home.

Nancy Reagan, he said, “knows what she wants, and there are no problems. It’s people who are unsure who give you the problems.”

A native of Los Angeles, Graber told The Times some years ago that he always knew what career direction he was headed in. “It was the way I was raised. My grandfather and father were antiquarians. As a young kid I would spend my Saturdays in my father’s antique shop making toys, being taught. . . . I spent the summers working in the shop. I lived with antiques.”

Graber worked in the family’s large antique store before attending the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He got his first interior design job at 17, when Joan Crawford’s aunt asked him to decorate a house she was remodeling.

Graber returned to Los Angeles after serving in the Army during World War II and went to work for noted interior designer Williams Haines. Haines, his mentor and later his business partner, died in 1973, leaving the firm in Graber’s hands. Graber retired in 1989 and moved to Northern California.