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The Truth About The Obama Sisters’ Lives After The White House

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The Obamas swapped the White House for a Kalorama compound, and the real drama turned out to be over closet space.

Two years removed from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack and Michelle Obama settled their family into a very different kind of home base — one where the biggest post-presidency power struggle wasn’t about policy, but about who got the good bedroom. The answer, according to Michelle herself, was not the former president.

• The Obamas bought an 8,200-square-foot, eight-bedroom home in D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood for $8.1 million in mid-2017, after initially renting it, so Sasha could finish high school at Sidwell Friends.
• During her February 2018 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Michelle Obama revealed that then-16-year-old Sasha claimed a custom two-room suite with its own attached living area, while Barack was stuck with the smallest room in the house as his office.
• Malia Obama took a gap year in 2016-2017 — interning at the U.S. Embassy in Spain and at The Weinstein Company in New York — before enrolling at Harvard in the fall of 2017.

Sasha Gets the Suite, Barack Gets the Closet Complaint

Michelle Obama’s first post-White House sit-down interview, on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in February 2018, doubled as the family’s first real accounting of what life inside the new house actually looks like. She described Sasha’s setup as basically a private apartment carved out of the family home — a bedroom paired with its own separate living room, custom-built for a teenager who was, by that point, the only child still living there full time.

Barack didn’t fare as well. Michelle told Ellen that the former president got stuck with the smallest room in the house for his office and didn’t even have proper closet space to show for it. Her verdict was blunt.

Barack was “shortchanged” and “hating on” Sasha over the room situation, Michelle Obama said.

It’s the kind of detail that made the rounds well beyond Ellen’s studio audience — a former commander-in-chief losing a real estate argument to his teenage daughter, inside his own house.

Malia’s Gap Year, Then Harvard

While Sasha was settling into the new house full-time, Malia was already building an independent life outside it. She graduated high school in 2016 and used her gap year productively, interning at the U.S. Embassy in Spain before moving to New York to work at The Weinstein Company. By the fall of 2017, she was enrolled at Harvard University, living in campus dorms like any other freshman.

Barack Obama later described the emotional weight of that move-in day to David Letterman, calling it something that felt like “open heart surgery.” It’s a rare moment of the former president speaking plainly about the transition from raising kids in the most secure and scrutinized residence in the country to dropping his oldest daughter off in a dorm room like every other parent that August.

No Room for a College Kid

Malia’s new status as a college student came with a corresponding demotion on the home front. Because she was living in Harvard’s dorms rather than at Kalorama, Michelle joked on Ellen that Malia’s accommodations back home amounted to “a room up in the attic somewhere” whenever she visited.

Michelle’s reasoning was matter-of-fact: “you don’t waste rooms on college kids.” It’s a small, telling line — the same family that once occupied the second floor of the White House was now running the same math as any other household with a kid away at school, prioritizing space for the child who’s actually still living there.

Across the transition, both sisters worked to keep their day-to-day lives as ordinary as possible — Sasha finishing out high school in the city she grew up watching from behind Secret Service lines, Malia adjusting to dorm life and internships like any other twenty-something trying to figure out what comes next, even with cameras still occasionally finding them along the way.