The Nina Simone house that matters is not a mansion. It is a three-room clapboard cottage in Tryon, North Carolina, where she was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 and where she first sat down at a piano. In 2016 it was in severe disrepair and for sale, and demolition was a real possibility.
What happened next is unusual enough to be worth telling properly. Four artists bought it privately to stop that, for $95,000. The National Trust for Historic Preservation took the property on, secured permanent legal protection for it, and completed a full rehabilitation in November 2025. This guide covers that house and its rescue, what the restoration deliberately did not do, whether you can visit, and the other places Simone lived after she left the United States.
Who was Nina Simone?
Nina Simone was an American singer, pianist, songwriter and civil rights activist, born in Tryon in 1933 as Eunice Waymon. She trained as a classical pianist and had ambitions toward the concert stage before building a career that moved across jazz, blues, gospel, folk and pop without settling in any of them.
Her work became inseparable from the civil rights movement, through songs including “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” She left the United States in 1970 and spent the rest of her life abroad, living at different times in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. She died in April 2003, aged 70, at her home in Carry-le-Rouet in southern France.
Her childhood in Tryon matters to the property story specifically because of what happened in that house. She began playing piano there as a small child, and the town raised money to fund her early formal lessons.
The Tryon house, and how close it came to being lost
The house is a modest three-room clapboard structure. It is not architecturally distinguished and it was never grand; that is precisely the point of it. By 2016 it was in poor condition and on the market, and buildings like it, in small towns, in bad repair, with no protection, are usually demolished.
In 2017 four African American artists intervened. The painter Adam Pendleton, the artist Rashid Johnson, the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher and the abstract painter Julie Mehretu formed a company together and bought the house for $95,000, explicitly to prevent its loss. It is a rare example of artists acting directly as preservationists with their own money, rather than campaigning for someone else to do it.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation then took the site up, designating it a National Treasure. In September 2020 its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, working with the World Monuments Fund and Preservation North Carolina, secured permanent protection for the building, which removed the risk of a future owner demolishing or substantially altering it.
The restoration, and what it deliberately avoided
The full rehabilitation was completed in November 2025. The approach taken is worth understanding, because it is a departure from how historic homes are usually treated.
The work used historically accurate methods and preserved sections of original material, paint and stain colours reflecting how the house looked in the mid-1930s, when the Waymon family lived there. The National Trust’s HOPE Crew carried out early stabilisation, and the wider project brought together preservationists at every level from entry-grade trainees to experienced craftspeople.
What the team did not do is furnish it as a period house museum. There are no replicated furnishings and no attempt to stage the rooms as they might have looked. The building is being treated as a space for public programming rather than as a diorama. The practical additions are limited and carefully handled: a preservation-compliant accessible ramp, a geothermal heating and cooling system chosen so that plant equipment does not intrude, and fire suppression and electrical systems integrated out of sight.
That restraint is a considered position. A restored building can be made to look convincing and, in the process, lose the thing that made it worth saving. Other preserved homes of major Black historical figures have wrestled with the same question, including Frederick Douglass’s Cedar Hill and Nelson Mandela’s house in Soweto.
Can you visit the Nina Simone house?
Not yet. As of the National Trust’s own account of the completed rehabilitation, the house is not open to the public.
The Action Fund has said it is working with the Tryon community and with the Waymon family to develop programming and cultural heritage tourism plans for the site. That is the current status: the building is saved, permanently protected and physically restored, and the question of how and when people will be able to go inside is still being worked out with the people most closely connected to it.
Anyone planning a trip should check the National Trust’s page for the property before travelling, rather than relying on this or any other article for opening arrangements.
Where did Nina Simone live after leaving the United States?
Because Simone died in 2003, the question of where she lives now does not apply, but her later homes are part of the picture and are often left out.
She left the United States in 1970, in part over the treatment of Black Americans and in part over her own circumstances, and did not return to live there. Over the following three decades she was based at various points in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. Her final home was in Carry-le-Rouet, a small coastal town near Marseille, and she died there on 21 April 2003.
None of those later residences has been preserved or opened to the public, and none has attracted the kind of documentation the Tryon house now has. The house she was born in, the smallest and least valuable property she ever occupied, is the one that survives with legal protection and a restoration behind it.
Sources
- National Trust for Historic Preservation on the 2017 purchase by the four artists, the restoration approach, the November 2025 completion, the accessibility and building systems, and the fact that the house is not yet open to the public.
- National Trust for Historic Preservation project page for the Nina Simone Childhood Home.
- Spectrum News on the completed restoration and its significance in Tryon.
- Britannica for her biography, her departure from the United States and her death in Carry-le-Rouet.
