From God’s HOUSE to a HOME Step inside the North End churchturned-$2.9 million house
BY LEX NELSON
In the spring of 2020, Cooper Kalisek and his business partner, Jon King, ripped into the walls of the nearly 100-year-old United Presbyterian Church of Boise. Behind the boards nested ancient fliers, 80-year-old blank checks, and children’s scribbles — the paraphernalia of decades of Sunday school classes, sermons, and mornings passing the offering plate. “We found Sunday school fliers where kids were writing and drawing all sorts of things that you can imagine 13-year-old boys draw on Sunday school fliers,” Kalisek says. “Names, so-and-so loves so-and-so, all of that stuff.” The 4,880-square-foot church still stands at 1723 West Eastman Street in Boise’s North End neighborhood, but from February 2020 to April 2021, Kalisek and King’s company, North End Devco LLC, transformed it from a house of worship into a luxury four-bedroom, fourbath home. Its combination of high
ceilings, thoughtful design elements, and whimsical art pieces (like robot-themed oil paintings, art-covered skateboards, and a stuffed marlin over the door) make it feel part holy space and part art gallery.
“What we had was a historic building on the outside, but we had a blank slate on the inside.” Kalisek took the lead on designing the church’s sleek new look, filling it with his one-of-a-kind functional pieces, including railings and tables handcrafted by a reclusive self-proclaimed “ancient, ancient Idaho” welder and a coffee table he built himself
from a castoff piece of concrete countertop. The pitted stone caught his eye, and when he was cutting it down to size, inspiration struck. “I was snapping my chalk line on there, and the color that the blue chalk left in the caverns and imperfections in that countertop looked really cool, so I just dumped my chalk out, rubbed it around with a little bit of water, sponged it off, and then sealed it,” he says. To complete the piece, Kalisek added a polished teak root ball to the base and lit the whole thing from below. “It’s probably one of the more commented-on pieces. Four hundred pounds of concrete and metal that would have gone to the dump ended up being, in my opinion — and I might be a little biased — a priceless coffee table,” he says. That coffee table lives in what was once the church nave, today a bright, open-concept living and dining space filled with colorful art and high-end finishes. The centerpiece of the room
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