Nina Simone's Home Restored to Commemorate Her Remarkable Life

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 as a National Treasure.

Credit: ninasimone.com

The white clapboard house, that was always full of music, lies on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She lived there from her birth in 1933 until 1937, with her seven siblings and their parents. Simone learned piano by ear, and at the age of 2-and-a-half, the future 'High Priestess of Soul' played her first song God Be With You Till We Meet Again. “I didn’t get interested in music,” she said in a 1984 interview. “It was a gift from God.”

In 2016, Simone’s childhood home went on the market. Realizing the little-known landmark was in danger of being demolished, a group of artists clubbed together and acquired it for $95,000. They planned to restore the house and open it to the public and now, nearly a decade later, the house in Tyron is about to open to the public.

Simone's dilapidated home in 2016 | Credit: National Trust for Historic Preservation

“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 African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, tells Architectural Digest. “And our vision was to create a singular place where her legacy will endure.”

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, says Smithsonian Magazine. 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. She went on to record more than 40 albums up to 1974. She released her first and biggest hit single in the United States in 1959 with I Loves You,

Porgy. Simone became known for her work in the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s, and she later left the United States and settled in France following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. She lived and performed, to considerable acclaim, in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She died in 2003, at her home in France.

Simone's house as it looks today | Credit: AACHAF

Fundraising efforts, including a May 2023 gala and auction - with some extra stardust sprinkled on it by Venus Williams - brought in sufficient funds to cover the house’s renovation. Preservation work began in June 2024, and it just recently wrapped up. According to a statement, the 650-square-foot house - which was built in the early 20th century - now looks how it did when Simone lived there. Both inside and out.

Though the house’s restoration is complete, it’s not yet open to the public, as the team are working with the Tryon community to make the house a shared space open to “eventual cultural heritage tourism.”

Now, how about some music? Here's Nina Simone's I Put a Spell on You, which also happens to be the title of her 1991 autobiography.