They Made Sure Their Church-to-Home Conversion “Still Looked Like a Church”

Welcome to Different Strokes, a look at unique home design choices that beg for further explanation.

Angus Fredenburg and Esther Han knew as soon as they drove by the yellow-painted wooden clapboard church in bucolic Landenberg, Pennsylvania, that it was meant to be their future home. Set on two-and-a-half acres, the picturesque property included the late-19th-century main church and several exterior buildings. But it was far from turnkey.

"We both really like old buildings and that character that comes with them, and we knew that it could be turned into something really cool," Esther says. "We contacted our realtor right then, and said ‘this is the house we want.’ She thought we were crazy."

Originally built in 1893, the property needed a lot of work, but it also came with a rich history. After the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church was deconsecrated in the 1960s, local artist Bernard "Bernie" Felch and his wife Rosamund "Roz" duPont turned it into their home and informal artist’s salon, leaving the space mostly unchanged from its previous life as a house of worship for about 50 years. Dupont continued to live there after Felch died in 2008, and when she moved out, Felch’s daughter cared for it while it sat unoccupied.

The building came filled with books and art and several pianos (one of which Angus and Esther kept). Having purchased the place in winter of 2021 during the pandemic, the couple moved there after Esther, a gynecological surgeon, completed a medical fellowship in New York City and accepted a job at a hospital close to Landenberg. They envisioned the property as a rural residence that they could host and entertain from, but they made sure to add home offices for Angus, an educator, and Esther, who has since started a job where she works four days a week in New York, and one day remotely.

The couple wanted to maintain many of the hallmarks of the building’s past. Church-to-home conversions, which exist at the intersection of a few trends—including the global decline of religion in younger generations and the oversupply of property owned by faith-based institutions amid the growing need for new, affordable housing—require some pretty specialized expertise to pull off well. The couple enlisted Val Nehez of Studio IQL, a Philadelphia-based interior design studio whose offices are in an 1890s church the firm converted, to make theirs happen.

Their renovation retained the 22-foot-high ceilings, stained-glass windows, and original tin ceiling tiles. "A lot of what I would call ‘repurposing’ in the renovation process was reusing original materials in different spots in the church," Angus says. "We removed and refinished a lot of materials like trim, railing, doors, glass, and ceiling panels and then put them back either in place or somewhere new." The confessional became a closet with the original doors intact, and the sacristies transformed into a pantry and mudroom. They converted the choir loft into the primary bedroom, put the kitchen in a raised area that used to be the altar, and added a catwalk along one side of the former church’s nave to create upstairs workspaces above a family room. The addition of radiant floor heating ensured that the notoriously drafty building type was warm and cozy year-round. 

Thanks to Angus’s DIY chops—which he developed as a kid helping his "jack-of-all-trades" father with projects around a house that was in a constant state of renovation—and both his and Esther’s hands-on roles in the interior design, Nehez likened the process of transforming the 100-seater former house of faith into a comfortable 4,000-square-foot home to an Amish barn raising. We spoke with Angus, Esther, and Nehez about the specific challenges presented by this project, and how they made it their own while honoring the legacy of its past. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did you make the church livable while also honoring its history?

Esther Han: We did not want to wall it off and cart it into a bunch of bedrooms and make it so that it didn’t look like a church anymore. We wanted it so that no matter where you were standing, it still looked like a church.

Val Nehez: The primary bedroom is actually the choir loft, so it still looks down into the [main] room. We actually put exterior windows so it closes off as a bedroom. If you look at the kitchen, there’s still the old railing that separated the altar. There were two vestibules that brought you into the back, and we kept those shapes.

Let’s talk about the catwalk.

VN: Esther created a catwalk along the upper part, where you are actually able to look down into the other spaces and really preserve that energy and volume. It allowed us to create intimate areas within these great big volumes, because when you want to concentrate, it helps to be in a small space. We gave Esther a view of the trees, and the end of the catwalk terminates into Angus’ workspace, which is over the kitchen.

Was it important to you to keep the stained-glass windows? Were there any challenges with preserving them?

EH: We love them. There were some cracks in various panes. [Some of them] have this hand-etched lacy pattern, so it does provide some privacy. Some of them were broken, so we stole the ones that were still intact from the other side [of the building]. All the lacy ones are [now] on one side and then the other ones that are regular clear glass were easier to replace. Then we put storm windows on the other side [of the building] so it could be better for energy usage. 

Were there any other key elements or original details that you felt strongly that needed to either be incorporated or maintained?

VN: The mesh we used for the railing. Something we really worked on was, How do we have that not feel like railing? That mesh is from a historic company in Philadelphia that’s been in operation since 1750 making wire. But it’s very stiff. So we felt like that preserved that layered, simplified look. Glass [would have been] noisy in terms of sound bouncing, but [the mesh] still allows the light to move through the railing.

EH: The previous owners had put in an entire wall of windows. They were super structurally sound, so [we redid them by adding] support beams in there. But we really wanted to keep the south-facing, floor-to-ceiling windows. So Val and her team were able to do a kitchen design that didn’t put anything along those walls. I really wanted the kitchen to be on the south side because I wanted to be able to do indoor/outdoor stuff. 

What about the logistics of this project were surprising or challenging?

VN: For me the biggest concern was energy. We had talked about doing geothermal. We thought about a Tesla roof. But then the concern was with the basement being stone, how do we make sure the envelope is secure. That was [my] biggest stressor in terms of having it perform like a house, because Esther’s biggest concern was that she was always going to be cold.

What about it makes you feel at home?

EH: It’s such a warm and inviting space, even though it’s still big and grand. It’s the wood, it’s the partition spaces, it’s the warm floor, it’s the colors, it’s all the old things that we’ve collected. I think it just feels really inviting, and it’s such a comfortable feeling. 

Top photo by Rebecca McAlpin.

More Different Strokes stories:

Sure, Why Not Build Your House With a 6,000-Pound Spiral Slide and a Glass Floor?

A Fox-Shaped Tree House Came to Her in a Dream. So, She and Her Husband Spent Years Building It