Nina Simone’s Childhood Home, Saved From Demolition Years Ago, Has Now Been Fully Restored

A group of contemporary artists purchased the house in 2017, and its long-awaited renovation began in June 2024

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

November 25, 2025

street sign — The house is located in Tryon, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund

A dilapidated three-room house in North Carolina, where a little girl named Eunice Waymon learned to play the piano in the 1930s, has been carefully restored. A group of artists purchased the unassuming property eight years ago to preserve the legacy of that girl, who grew up to be the pivotal musician Nina Simone.

“Preserving our home preserves the piano lessons, the joy, the discipline and the discovery of her gifted talent all recorded in those walls,” says Samuel Waymon, Simone’s younger brother, in a statement from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s an honor to share this with the world as she would have wanted me to.”

The white clapboard house lies on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Tryon, North Carolina. Simone lived there from her birth in 1933 until 1937, with her siblings and their mother and father. She was one of eight children. The house was full of music; her earliest memories were of her mother singing hymns, reported the New Yorker’s Claudia Roth Pierpont in 2014. Simone learned piano by ear, and at the age of 2-and-a-half, the future “High Priestess of Soul” played her first song on the organ keys: “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”

The three-room house before the restoration African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund

In 2016, Simone’s childhood home went on the market. Realizing the little-known landmark was in danger of being demolished, curator Laura Hoptman reached out to her friend Adam Pendleton, a painter.

“I realized that the someone to spring into action, the someone to do something, was me,” Pendleton tells Architectural Digest’s Carly Olson.

Pendleton enlisted fellow contemporary artists Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu and Ellen Gallagher to form Daydream Therapy, LLC. They purchased Simone’s childhood home for $95,000, planning to restore the house and open it to the public.

“We all reconciled our enthusiasm and recognition of how these kinds of sites—these kinds of opportunities—provide things that sometimes are hard to articulate,” Johnson tells Architectural Digest. “Sometimes it’s just the feeling of being in a place that matters, and that tells the story of someone that matters.”

The house, post-renovation, boasts an ADA-compliant ramp. African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund

After Simone and her family moved from the house, the young musician came to specialize in classical piano—particularly, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. She took piano lessons and attended a private high school in Asheville on the dimes of white benefactors. After graduating as valedictorian, she attended the Juilliard School in New York City. Her goal was to become a concert pianist.

Simone began singing and playing piano at a bar and grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey, under the new stage name Nina Simone, in 1954. In the late 1950s, she signed a record deal and released the album Little Girl Blue. From there, she continued to rise in popularity as a musician and a civil rights activist.

“An artist’s duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times,” Simone once said. As Smithsonian magazine’s Ellen Wexler reported in 2023, Simone performed at civil rights demonstrations and wrote protest songs like “Mississippi Goddam,” which responded to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. She became a regular performer at Carnegie Hall and toured Europe, finding more acclaim abroad. She died in 2003, at her home in France.

After Pendleton and the other artists purchased the Waymon family home, they partnered with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), which is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust designated the site a “National Treasure” in 2018.

“Our role was to ensure the home wasn’t just preserved, but protected forever as a living symbol of Nina Simone’s life,” Brent Leggs, executive director of the AACHAF, tells Architectural Digest. “And our vision was to create a singular place where her legacy will endure.”

Fundraising efforts, including a May 2023 gala and auction, brought in more than $5 million to fund the house’s renovation. Preservation work began in June 2024, and it just recently wrapped up. According to the statement, the 650-square-foot house—which was built in the early 20th century—now looks how it did when Simone lived there.

Workers replaced stamped tin roof shingles, refinished pine walls and wood flooring and installed a modern geothermal heating system, reports Architectural Digest. They also added a fire suppression system and a wheelchair ramp. The house has a swept-dirt yard, a landscape design that became common in the South after possibly originating in Africa. At the back of the property stands a large magnolia tree nicknamed “Sweetie Mae.” It was there when Simone was a child.

Though the house’s restoration is complete, it’s not yet open to the public. Per the statement, the action fund and the artists’ company are working with the Tryon community to make the house a shared space open to “eventual cultural heritage tourism.”

Pendleton recalls the awe he felt when visiting the Simone house for the first time, realizing he was standing where she’d stood as a little girl. “That overwhelmed me, this idea that everything begins somewhere,” he tells Architectural Digest. “And this is where it began for her.”

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