The Tony and Emmy award-winning actor LaChanze, 60 — who is currently starring in a limited-run Broadway production of “Trouble In Mind” — lives
in a five-bedroom house in Westchester County. “I never really created a home until I got this house,” she said.

“My mother always stressed that when you walk in the front door you should leave behind everything from the world outside. I’ve incorporated that feeling into our living space,” said LaChanze, the mother of two children, Celia Rose Gooding, 21, an actor, and Zaya LaChanze Gooding, 20, a college student. 


LaChanze’s three cats have the run of the house.


What she refers to as her “heart-of-the-house light” is always illuminated.


The brown crushed-velvet sectional in the family room was custom-made.


LaChanze, a fan of the game bid whist, estimates that she has some 100 decks of cards.


Show posters line the walls of the basement gym.


A decorative Fabergé-style egg sits in the china cupboard in the dining room.


There’s an ad hoc recording studio in the basement.



LaChanze’s husband of three years, Calvin Gooding, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. A steel remnant from one of the towers is in the bookcase in the family room.


LaChanze has a reading corner in the basement. 


“I love this photograph of me from when I was in ‘Dessa Rose,’” she said, referring to the 2005 Off Broadway musical. “I love the expression on my face.
You can tell there’s something going on, you just don’t know what it is, and that’s what the arts are to me.”


“My mother used to say you should be able to make a delicious dinner with what’s in your house in 30 minutes or less,” said LaChanze,
who demonstrates how to pull off this culinary trick to her fans on Instagram.


The cloth bag that was part of LaChanze’s costume in “The Color Purple” hangs in her office. 



The sculpture “A Billion Tongues Yet No Voice,” by LaChanze’s friend, R. Lloyd Ming, a conceptual artist, is on display in the living room.


Dung art from Rwanda hangs over the Bechstein upright piano.