Queen of Arts

NCIS: New Orleans’ star CCH Pounder takes Watch! inside her captivating, colorful world

- JOHN GRIFFITHS

SOMETIMES LIFE JUST IS ART. Especially if you’re estimable actress CCH Pounder, who—after notching a day of playing coroner Dr. Loretta Wade on NCIS: New Orleans—comes home to a vast array of paintings, sculptures, and tapestries that adorn her walls, floors, tables, cabinets, counters, and chairs. Some of her chairs are art pieces and presented as such, mounted in all their ornate, colorful glory alongside framed sketches in the star’s two-story Big Easy abode.

In her living room can be found two giant wooden statues of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god who cares for the dead. “I’m really lucky to have high ceilings,” a laughing Pounder says of the place she’s inhabited since 2017. Back at her former home in L.A., those mega-statues “used to scrape at the top.” Meanwhile her kitchen, she doesn’t mind saying, is “jammed” with fantastical Ardmore ceramics—vases, urns, and teapots festooned with tiny tigers and elephants handmade by South African artists. Her overall art collection of more than 500 pieces takes up half her first floor “and three storage rooms outside, too!”