American Archive: Stories from the White House
A digital companion to the White House Tour.
The brief from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
First Lady Jill Biden's office and the White House Historical Association set out to create a digital companion to the physical White House tour — a mobile-first experience that would surface the human, relatable stories of the residence and reach an audience far beyond the small number who walk the tour in person.
NBBJ Design brought Koalition in as the build partner: a team who could translate NBBJ's design vision into a fast, accessible, content-rich microsite that lived up to the institution's standard — and that the WHHA's editorial team could maintain long after launch.
Headless, mobile, written for editors
We delivered the full technical build of American Archive: Stories from the White House — a mobile-first microsite that pairs short-form video, illustrated artifacts, and editorial vignettes spanning two centuries of life inside the residence.
The architecture is headless. A CraftCMS backend gives the WHHA team a familiar editorial workflow for adding new stories over time. A Next.js frontend renders the experience as a long-scroll narrative with video overlays, image carousels, and a persistent navigation menu. Original video content, produced by A&E Networks and the History Channel, is integrated as native players inside the editorial flow.
We worked closely with NBBJ Design from concept through ship — shaping interactive moments alongside their creative team rather than waiting for handoff. That's the kind of build partnership the project required: an institution-grade brief, a creative agency that owned the vision, and a build partner who could meet both on their level.
Two centuries, on a phone
American Archive launches a new format for cultural institutions: a digital experience that doesn't replace the physical tour, but extends it to anyone with a phone.
The initial release features around 40 vignettes spanning two centuries of White House life — Eleanor Roosevelt's Red Room press conferences, Theodore Roosevelt's family menagerie, the Ford family's senior prom in the East Room, the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Civil War soldiers bunking on the floor. The kinds of stories that don't fit into a docent's script but make the residence feel like a residence.
The platform is built to grow. Themed content drops — Holidays at the White House, Architectural Evolution, Pets of the Residence — can be added by the editorial team without touching code, and promoted through the existing tour-confirmation email flow or through A&E's distribution channels.
American Archive is exactly the kind of project Koalition is built for: a build partnership where an agency's creative vision needs a technical and editorial partner who's done institutional work before. Together with NBBJ Design and A&E Networks, we extended a 200-year-old institution into a format people actually use — accessible to anyone, whether they ever set foot on the official tour.
