Dix Hills home of John and Alice Coltrane closing in on complete renovation

A yearslong renovation of the Dix Hills home of the late jazz musicians John and Alice Coltrane is on track to finish by early 2027, according to the president of the nonprofit working to preserve it.

"We hope a visit to the house ... will be life-changing," Steve Fulgoni, president of Friends of the Coltrane Home, said Tuesday, the eve of the centennial of John Coltrane’s birth. "Our mission, in John’s words, is to be a force for good. That’s what we hope the home will be, not simply a historic house."

The four-bedroom Candlewood Path split ranch, where John Coltrane composed his 1965 album, "A Love Supreme," and Alice Coltrane recorded five albums, was vacant and slated for demolition when Huntington Town bought it in 2005 and transferred it to Fulgoni’s group. "The pipes had burst, the house was vandalized, animals had come in" and mold had spread throughout much of the structure, Fulgoni said. One of the nonprofit's first tasks was to patch holes in the roof.

Since 2020, Fulgoni and other volunteers have focused on re-creating the house as it was during the Coltranes’ time there, using $4 million in grants from Suffolk County and the Manhattan-based Mellon Foundation to hire craftspeople.

They repaired the wood frame, damaged by termites and water, so it will be able to withstand the load of visitors expected to tromp through. They modeled the facade with architectural software, stripped thousands of bricks down to the gypsum sheathing, restored the siding, cleaned the bricks and put them back on the house.

They have begun work on the interior, focusing on an upstairs bedroom where John Coltrane composed and the basement studio where Alice Coltrane recorded during their time in the house, which lasted from 1964 to 1972 (John Coltrane died in 1967 at Huntington Hospital at the age of 40). Interior restoration draws partly on the recollections of the Coltranes’ children and the woman who bought the house from Alice Coltrane in 1973. It also draws on a set of photographs shared by Coltrane scholar Yasuhiro Fujioka, who bought them from a photographer for a Japanese jazz magazine who did a 1969 shoot at the house, and forensics by preservationist Joel Snodgrass, who used a microscope to look at Sheetrock taken from the house to determine the color of the paint that once coated its walls.

"Alice," said Fulgoni, "had it painted in blue, pink, green, yellow. ... It was visually exciting."

One focal point will be a meditation room in gold, red, orange and blue with a 2-inch shag rug. Another will be a 4-foot stained glass window, rescued from possible ruin by a tenant who rented the house before its slated demolition and was told by her landlord to take it if she wanted it. She heard about the restoration and returned the window.

Alice Coltrane took the original studio equipment with her to California when the family moved in 1972. She died in 2007 at age 69. Modern equipment will replace it, and the Friends intend to open the studio to school-age musicians, Fulgoni said. A later phase of the work will build walking paths through the home’s 3.5-acre yard and restore a garden where Alice Coltrane meditated.

"The typical house museum, people can’t sit, they have to stay behind the velvet rope and not touch," said Robert Hughes, Huntington Town historian and a Friends board member. "We want this to be more interactive. People can sit on the furniture, listen to music, just enjoy the atmosphere and not be rushed by a tour guide but move at their own pace."

Design studio Pentagram is advising on the interiors; Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects is advising on the grounds.

In an interview, music historian Ashley Kahn described the house as a both cultural and personal artifact: "Here was one of the neighborhoods available to a Black man, and he invested in a house and the lot it was on. ... He’s thinking like a straight-ahead, middle-class American, thinking about the future, thinking about, yes, he does have steady income now as a [band] leader, and it’s very lucrative, relative to other jazz people."

Given space and peace and enabled by a partner who brought him food and took care of their children during his dayslong composing sessions, John Coltrane was able to make a masterpiece, said Kahn, author of a 2002 history of the album.

Still, "jazz has never been about shrines or museums," Kahn said.

But Adam Glaser, associate professor of music and director of orchestras at Hofstra University, said it was worthwhile to visit the places where his "musical heroes" spent time.

For Brahms, it was the Alps; for John Coltrane, it was this particular place on suburban Long Island.

"It humanizes them for me," Glaser said. "They’re like mythical figures, but they’re just real people. It makes their music and their stories much more relatable and inspiring. If they can do these great things, we can, too."