Weizmann House decoration over that of Mendelsohn. The house now displays the art and objects that the Weizmanns had collected. The design of the house was met with praise early on. One guest, the niece of Arthur Balfour described it as "a modern, aristocratic house, in harmony with its surroundings, well suited to its purpose, fully expressing the soul of its owners, and, like them, a national treasure." Beginning in 1949 until Chaim Weizmann's death three years later, the years Weizmann served as President of Israel, the house functioned as the official residence of the President. The house was adapted into a
Chaim Weizmann Nobel Prize laureate Fritz Haber, but took over the directorship himself after Haber's death en route to Palestine. During World War II, he was an honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply and did research on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. After the Second World War, a Jewish group called Nakam formulated several plans to kill Germans in revenge for the Holocaust. Nakam's leader Abba Kovner, a former Lithuanian partisan, testified that he had approached Weizmann (at that time, President of the World Zionist Organization) with plans for a mass poisoning and that Wiezmann had put him in touch