The space that would become the Chintz Room began in 1734 with the construction of a one-story frame house for Augustine Washington. That house survives today as the core of the Mansion, although its plan is not completely understood.
When he died in 1743, Augustine left the house and the land around it to his oldest son, Lawrence, who owned it until his death nine years later. It is not clear what, if any, changes to the house Lawrence made, but his probate inventory indicates that at the time of his death the house had 10 rooms distributed between the first floor and the garret. Exactly how many of these rooms were in the garret is debatable, but certainly the “room at the head of the stairs” was one of them. Of the remaining 9, the three public spaces (the hall, the passage and the parlor) would be on the first floor, leaving 6 rooms to be located. All but two of these rooms, the store room and an unnamed space, are heated, and therefore should be at the ends of the house where the chimneys were, and all but one, again the store room, had beds in them.
The room took its current form, with a full 8-foot high west wall containing two windows, in 1758, when the roof was raised to create a two-story structure with a garret. At that time, there was a doorway through the south wall (just east of the current closet door) that led out to the roof of a one-story closet addition. By this time, the floor framing had sagged considerably, forcing the builder to pull up the floorboards and shim the floor joists to level their tops; the floor boards were then reinstalled. The east partition wall shared with the Yellow Bedroom is built on top of these reinstalled floorboards, thus dating this wall to the 1758 work. Whether this wall replaced an earlier one in the same location is not known at this time.
