Welcome to EBONY’s new column, House to Home, where we invite you to explore the personal stories that shape our living spaces. In our very first edition, we have a heartfelt conversation with Imani Ellis, the founder of CultureCon and the CultureCon Collective. Join us as Imani shares how her upbringing and love for community have inspired her to transform her home into a warm, inviting sanctuary filled with art and history that truly reflects who she is in her sacred space.
The creative vision for Ellis’ home began long before the front door; it started with the influence of her parents. “I grew up as the daughter of two pastors in a relatively large family,” she told EBONY. “We had so many traditions in our home and so much Black art. There was so much Black art on our walls.”
As the oldest of four, she remembers designated seats at the dinner table, her mom and dad trading off in the kitchen to make home-cooked meals, and intimate rituals that became rites of passage in their lives. “The home has always been a very comforting retreat place for me, a safe space,” she said. “So when I moved into my own home, I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel so sterile and cold, but that it felt almost kind of reminiscent of just growing up in a really warm atmosphere.”
Today, that vision lives inside a Mid-Century Modern, open-floor-plan house that, at first, wasn’t what she had in mind at all. “I love estate sales and I love older homes,” she says. “I was originally drawn to a lot of homes from the 1960s that I really wanted to play with. But those didn’t work out.”
What she got instead was a space flooded with light, and soon, she would come to realize exactly what she needed. “It’s kind of like you really do end up finding what you need versus what you want,” she said. Through this process, she found herself trying to emulate the latest Pinterest and Instagram trends of the really aesthetically shaped homes and soon realized the only moodboard she needed was her own.
As the founder of CultureCon and The CultureCon Collective, communities were literally born from time spent at home. “I love hosting people,” she told EBONY. “Creative Collective and CultureCon were born from hosting friends for taco night. In this home, I’m able to cook in the kitchen and have friends in the living room. It’s so conducive to how I like to live my life.”
When Ellis first moved in, she did what many first-time homeowners do: she tried to follow the trends. “You’ve seen so many people do it, so you assume that’s how we do it,” she said. “My home was all beige.” She almost bought a beige couch, too, until her sister intervened. “She goes, ‘Girl, you cannot have a beige couch [laughs],’” Ellis said.
Those beige couches went back. In their place: a burnt orange sofa that now commands the living room. “A lot of people, when they think of neutrals, are thinking of browns and whites and beiges, but I want to argue that I think a burnt orange could almost be its own version of a neutral,” she says. “My first real moment of honesty was getting orange couches… that was honest to me and the lifestyle and how much I like to enjoy my space.”
For Ellis, design isn’t just decorative; it’s philosophical. “My design philosophy is just an extension of my life philosophy, which is how important history is in shaping the future,” she said. Growing up, her mother took her and her siblings to Black history museums, where they encountered names and stories they never saw in textbooks. “There’s so much in museums we did not learn in school,” she said.
That awareness now lives on her walls and shelves. In her home, she mixes pieces like EBONY magazines from the 1950s, a Kehinde Wiley print from the Obamas, a James Baldwin print, and a Jean-Michel Basquiat reprint. “I love just mixing history with contemporary art,” she said. Even everyday objects carry a past life. “I have this letter weight that weighs letters from 1909, and in the kitchen, it’s holding salt [laughs],” she said. “I like getting things that are historical but giving them a modern kind of utility.”
Her commitment to preservation is intentional and urgent. At estate sales, she often finds boxes of Black magazines and artifacts on the verge of being discarded. “They would be throwing out these magazines, these artifacts, and I would just say, who’s gonna preserve these things?” That question turned her into a collector. “When you talk about preserving our stories, what better literal manifestation than these stories on the wall? There needs to be proof that all of these stories existed.”
One of her most meaningful pieces arrived recently from her mother: steel framing salvaged from her great-great-great-grandmother’s outhouse in Clayton, Alabama. “I now have it in my home, and I have to figure out where I’m going to put that,” she said. “I like my home again to be like an extension of things that inspire me.”
That honesty extends to how she uses each room. Working from home, she’s careful not to let every surface become a desk. “It became about asking myself, what’s the function for each room?” she said. She wanted her office to feel “vibrant and alive and creative,” her living room to “almost feel like a hotel, welcoming and lived in,” and her bedroom to be “very kind of earth toned and grounded.” She avoids working from bed on purpose. “I want my body to know that when I come into my bedroom, I’m relaxing. When I’m sitting at my desk, it’s time to work.”
And then there is the play. Ellis is unphased about her love of whimsy. She has a dedicated playroom stocked with remote control cars, Play-Doh, and Lego florals. “As adults, sometimes we just forget that we have permission to play,” she said. In her house, that permission is non-negotiable.
Across the home, that sense of joy is felt, whether it’s the EBONY and LIFE covers that hang alongside images of Muhammad Ali and Jesse Jackson or the rooms being constant reminders of what it means to be part of a larger lineage. “There’s a mixture of playfulness in this home, but it’s also counterbalanced with responsibility,” she said. Seeing those faces every day keeps her grounded in the idea that time is precious, and that what we build with it matters.
Her home, she says, feels like a “museum of my life”: a place where her inner child has a dedicated room, her ancestors have a visible place of honor, and her present self has space to create, rest and host on her own terms.
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Living Room
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