“The Color Purple” house – that’s how actor LaChanze refers to her five-bedroom home in lower Westchester County, NY. This has nothing to do with the exterior (it’s gray) or the interior (plum, lavender, lilac, fuchsia, mulberry, and violet are underrepresented).
But it has everything to do with LaChanze’s Tony-winning performance in the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s famous 2005 novel. “Being in ‘The Color Purple’ allowed me to buy the house,” says LaChanze, who is currently the starring in the Broadway limited-run production — through January 9 — of Alice Childress’ 1955 comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.”
Her other Broadway credits include “Once on This Island” (1990), “If/Then” (2014), and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (2018). She won an Emmy in 2010 for the PBS special “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise.”
Sixteen years ago, after considering various housing options, LaChanze settled in the suburbs because she wanted her children, Celia Rose Gooding, now 21, an actor, and Zaya LaChanze Gooding, 20, a college student, to get to know firsthand. would have lawns and trees. She wanted relatively new construction for herself.
“I knew I’d live alone,” said LaChanze, 60, whose husband, Calvin Gooding, a Cantor Fitzgerald merchant who has been married for three years, was killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. “I knew I didn’t know how to make repairs. It narrowed my options, as many of the properties in Westchester are much older.”
LaChanze, 60
Activity: Actor
Good performance: “People love seeing how I make fried chicken on Instagram. My mom always said, ‘If you can’t cook a meal in less than 30 minutes, you’re not a good cook.’”
“I got lucky,” she continued. “I found a house that was built in 2000. I am the second owner.”
She might have had better luck in the area surrounding the house: lush greenery and a yard paved by both a park and the Bronx River.
“People can’t cross, so it’s like my own patch of water,” LaChanze said. “It’s quiet and scenic. That pretty much sold me.”
She has since added a fire pit and a set of wind chimes attached to a birch tree near the deck. They sound in the key of A. “I love that,” she said. “Many Negro spirituals are written in that key. Do you hear that agreement? It’s just beautiful.”
Unlike that chime, the house needed some fine-tuning. It certainly had style; it just wasn’t LaChanze’s specific style.
“There were gold-plated fixtures and I was like, ‘Nooooo,'” she said. They went out, replaced with nickel.
Down came the columns between the den and the kitchen to create a large space, and bookcases were built on either side of the fireplace. (One of the shelves contains a steel remnant of the twin towers.) Marble countertops, a marble floor, a glass tile back wall in shades of brown and copper, and a few coats of butter-yellow paint were part of the kitchen overhaul.
“I went to work here for a bit,” LaChanze said with a laugh. “All my friends and fans who follow me on Instagram know what my kitchen looks like.”
You can easily tell that this is the home of someone who works in the arts. The framed awards and stacks of scripts in the office, the space set up for recording sessions, the show posters on the wall in the basement gym, all make the point.
“I recently shot Spike Lee’s documentary on HBO,” LaChanze said, referring to “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021 ½”. “He gave me a copy of the poster for the show and signed it for me.”
It is equally obvious that this is the home of someone who cares about art. “I’m a bit of a collector,” LaChanze said. “I call my foyer my international space because I travel quite a bit and I have a lot of art from many different places” – a door from Nigeria, a drawing etched on the bark of a tree from Tonga, dung art from Rwanda.
The foyer also has a flowering fiddle-leaf fig, one of two that LaChanze, an avid gardener, bought this summer from Costco — for the bargain price of $69 each, she proudly tells you — and has been tending to it ever since, first on the deck, now by the stairs that lead to the second floor.
“I just love it to death. Look how big it is,’ she said, sounding like a very proud mother.
And there you have, in a nutshell, the primary job performed at LaChanze’s home: nurturing.
This is where the actor’s large, faraway family gathers twice a year for reunions, and where they are encouraged to fall asleep on the specially designed brown crushed velvet section in the den. A group of card-playing henchmen comes here every month for an evening of bidwhist.
“It’s something that’s big in my culture,” LaChanze said. “When I was young, my parents played with their friends, but then someone had to leave. They came and got me and taught me the game so they could keep going because you need four people.”
Her affection for the game and its most important part has stuck: she has collected 100 decks of very elegant cards.
“Okay, so one night I went down the internet rabbit hole and I discovered this group of people in a card collecting club,” LaChanze said. “I joined and every few months I get a new deck from a new designer. There are a lot of, I would say, bikers and magicians in the club, and it’s really nice talking to these guys across the country about what we love about our cards.
Near where LaChanze sets the card table in the basement, is a sofa covered in green velvet. “This is the first sofa my husband and I have bought together,” she said, patting a pillow softly. “We were at Bloomingdale’s and I told him I would love a good, deep couch that we could spoon on without feeling uncomfortable. We both adapt to that.”
She added: “I saved it so my girls can have a little piece of their dad here.”
When LaChanze comes home from the theater, she greets her three cats and then goes out on the deck, often with a glass of wine in hand, and listens to the wind chimes, or takes a walk to the water or to the fire pit.
“I love my house,” she said simply. “My friends tell me, ‘Well, LaChanze, you’re getting older. Your daughters are gone all the time. Why do you want to live alone in this big place?’”
Only? She doesn’t look at it that way.
She has her piece of the river. She has the stars. She has what she calls the heart-of-the-house light, a lamp in the dining room that is never off. She falls asleep every night to the lullaby of Metro-North’s train whistle.
“I love hearing that sound,” said LaChanze. “Because it reminds me that I’m not alone.”
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