‘This is where it all began’: Nina Simone’s childhood home gets a long-awaited rehab | Nina Simone

IIt was a surreal experience for Dr. Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s younger brother, when he returned to the renovated childhood home he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that fall day in 2025, Waymon, the 81-year-old award-winning composer, said memories came flooding back to him playing the organ at home and cooking on the stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed when he saw the big tree from his youth still standing in the courtyard. Simone, whose real name was Eunice Waymon, lived in a three-room, 650-square-foot house with her family from 1933 to 1937.

After sitting vacant and severely deteriorating for more than two decades, the recently restored house has now been painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint blue wall, a shadow box covers the rusty brown varnish of the original house. A small piece of Depression-era linoleum lies on the restored wood floor like an island of the past in a sea of ​​the present.

“It brings wonderful tears of joy to my heart and to my eyes when I stand in that house, on the porch, and walk into the rooms where the fireplace is, and say, ‘Wow, this is really real. The house has been restored,'” Waymon said. “It’s like time travel.”

The home was purchased for $95,000 in 2017 by four Black artists behind the group Daydream Therapy LLC — contemporary artist Adam Pendleton, painter and sculptor Rashid Johnson, abstract artist Julie Mehretu, and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher. For them, the structure is confirmation that black history is worth investing in. The restoration comes at a time when historians and researchers say the federal government is trying to reduce the contributions of black Americans. A presidential executive order directed Vice President J.D. Vance to stop spending on race-based programs or exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution and its museums and research centers. The restoration of Simone’s childhood home could serve as an example of how privately funded projects can preserve Black history during a time when federally funded programs are under threat.

On September 1, the full rehabilitation of the house was completed after several years of planning and fundraising for approximately $850,000 in materials, construction and engineering costs for the renovation, which began in June 2024. The project was overseen by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), which is now working with a consulting team and the Tryon community to create a long-term management and programming plan for the site. They hope to create a cultural district around the house, which is expected to open to the public for tourism in 2027.

“What I love is the fact that they didn’t destroy the basic structure of the house, they improved it and restored it. So I think when the public or anyone goes into the house, they can feel the spirit and energy that is in that house,” Waymon said. “If one believes in spirits, he will feel it when he walks into that house [that] Nina Simone, Eunice and Eamonn were there. And that’s the joy I get from it. It’s too strong.”

Tiffany Tolbert, director of heritage preservation at AACHAF, said it is important that cultural sites within the Black community are given the same importance as other demographic groups. “Being able to preserve the birth or childhood home of these icons and activists and leaders in the African American community is really important so that future generations understand where we come from, how these individuals came to be, the icons that we know them to be, and also understand the African American experience more broadly in this country,” she said. “Having this house still exist, having it where people can visit, where they can learn, is important because it greatly enhances the understanding of the African American experience in the mid-20th century in itself.”

“We are the ones we have been waiting for”

Simone’s house first came under Pendleton’s radar in the winter of 2016, when he received a letter from a museum curator who alerted him that the house was for sale. At first, Pendleton thought of other people who might be able to maintain and protect the house, but then he thought of the last line of poet June Jordan’s poem to the women of South Africa: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

“I eventually realized that it wasn’t someone else. It was me,” Pendleton said. “It was a gesture, an act that I thought could have a greater impact if a group of people joined forces to protect and preserve Nina Simone’s childhood home.”

With the help of another curatorial friend, Pendleton brainstormed a list of fellow artists who might be interested in joining him, and soon Johnson, Mehretu, and Gallagher were on board.

When the group bought the house the following year, Pendleton was thinking about what American culture was and how it was represented. The house signifies Simon’s contributions to American history. “So much of how we understand our culture as a country and understand our place within it is through memory,” Pendleton said. “And memory, of course, is embodied in individuals. It is also embodied in different art forms, from painting and sculpture, and of course, in the case of Nina Simone, her music.” “Her music is powerful formally, but also politically and culturally as well, as she was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement during her time.”

Walking through the house shortly after purchasing it, Pendleton was struck by how homely it felt. “This is where it all started for Nina, in this humble house,” he recalls. “And it occurred to me at that moment that it all starts somewhere.”

Next, the artists worked with AACHAF, which developed a strategy to preserve the house. In 2020, AACHAF created a conservation easement, a legal agreement that restricts any future changes to the property and prevents demolition, which will be overseen by the historic preservation nonprofit Preservation North Carolina. Architectural consultants and AACHAF created a blueprint of what the house looked like when it was first constructed by researching typical African American homes in North Carolina during the early 1900s and using an old family photo from when the Waymons family lived there. They also took evidence of the materials used in the foundation and roof to rebuild the building and prevent further deterioration. The architects created a restoration plan that included repairing doorways and walls, leveling the floors, and creating an accessible ramp.

AACHAF has also been involved in the preservation of saxophonist John Coltrane’s homes on Long Island, New York, and Philadelphia. It also made direct grants to preserve the home of jazz musician and singer Louis Armstrong in New York and the home of blues singer Muddy Waters in Chicago.

With the Simon House, Tolbert said, “A model is being built that blends building preservation, program and interpretation of these spaces with an emphasis on gaining a greater understanding of the heritage and experience of these individuals, and how the communities in which they lived or shaped their identity, both artistically and in terms of their right as leaders in the African American community.”

Pendleton and the rest of the group continued to work as actors on the project. In 2023, he partnered with AACHAF and tennis player Venus Williams to create an auction and fundraiser at Pace Gallery in New York. The project also received funding from the Mellon and Tegemus Foundations.

Now that the house has been restored, AACHAF and a consulting team are working with St Luke’s CME Church, where Simone’s mother, Kate Waymon, preached, to incorporate the surrounding East Side neighborhood into future programming. Pendleton sees the future of the house as a site of contemplation, he said, “and to become a place where artists go with the goal of writing music, for example, or performing in the city. In other words, if it can be a mechanism that drives history.”

If Simon visited the house today, Waymon said his sister would be amazed and grateful that it has been restored. Besides being representative of the building’s legacy as Simon’s last living sibling, Waymon is also keeping her memory alive by releasing a new duet with his sister for “Love Me or Leave Me” in mid-January 2026. His sister’s voice was recorded in 1967 and Waymon added his own voice several months ago to weave the present with the past. The project is a throwback to time, similar to what he felt when he stood on the balcony of his family’s recently restored home.