Diana Ross at Home: Purple Sofas, Conversation Pits and 12 Number Ones

Diana Ross furnished her own world, and a new photo roundup shows she did it with a purple sofa, a shag-lined conversation pit and a mirrored piano. The gallery, published by Architectural Digest's archivists, tracks The Boss at home from a Miami hotel suite in March 1970 to Quarry Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the 82-year-old lives today.

The record beneath the décor is formidable: 12 number-one singles with the Supremes, six more as a solo artist, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her domestic life, apparently, stayed ordinary. "My mom is such a mom," her daughter, actor Tracee Ellis Ross, said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. "I had a really regular upbringing." Regular, perhaps, is relative when the living room has 30-foot ceilings.

Where did the solo chapter begin?

A photo dated March 17, 1970 catches Ross on a floral sofa in her Miami suite. That January she had sung her final concert as lead singer of the Supremes; her debut solo album arrived that June. The portraits came during a nine-day run at Miami's Eden Roc hotel, her official solo debut after a preview in Framingham, Massachusetts. "Welcome to the 'Let's see if Diana Ross can do it by herself club,'" she told the audience, as journalist Shirley Eder reported in The Philadelphia Inquirer on March 20, 1970. Eder added that "Diana takes a long time to unwind after a performance… she screens movies in her suite almost nightly."

What did the Beverly Hills house hold?

Plenty. A 1972 New York Times profile put the home at 6,833 square feet, with an Andy Warhol tapestry of Marilyn Monroe, a swimming pool and a tennis court. The Los Angeles Times reported the five-bedroom, nine-bathroom property was built in 1964 for art collector Donald Factor and known locally as "the house with no windows" because its walls maximized hanging space for paintings. The conversation pit sat by a window dressed in a beaded curtain.

In 1972, eight months pregnant with Tracee, Ross leaned on that mirrored piano while discussing her first film role: Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, directed by Sidney J. Furie. The performance earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. "She's the greatest improviser I've ever known," Furie told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. "Some of the main scenes were improvised…. She was the consummate pro and not a diva at all." Director's verdict, filed for the record.

Who filled the rooms?

Family, mostly. Ross's career was launched by Motown founder Berry Gordy, with whom she had a daughter, Rhonda, born in 1971. She married music executive Robert Ellis Silberstein two months into the pregnancy; he raised Rhonda as his own. The couple had two more daughters, Tracee and Chudney, born in 1975. Both eldest girls followed their mother into performance — Tracee recently won her first Daytime Emmy for Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross, and Rhonda earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for the soap Another World.

Ross and Silberstein divorced in 1977. In 1978 she welcomed Barbara Walters to the house. "Within 24 hours before we came here she completely refurnished the living room," Walters narrated in the special — the conversation pit now wearing dark maroon carpet and a navy sofa. She married Norwegian businessman Arne Naess Jr. in 1986, had sons Ross and Evan, and divorced in 2000.

Her 38th birthday party, held at the house in March 1982, fills the final frames. That year brought Silk Electric, her 13th studio album, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She sold the property three years later for $1.75 million. Her 25th studio album, Thank You, arrived in 2021 — proof the woman who sang "It's my house and I live here" in 1979 never really moved out of the recording studio.