From God's House to a Home

Step inside the North End church-turned-$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 is the fireplace, a soaring pillar made from sheets of cold-rolled steel held in place by rare earth magnets. The sheets are edged with LED tape lights. It’s a modern touch that contrasts with the buttery light pouring through the windows.

“What we had was a historic building on the outside, but we had a blank slate on the inside,” Kalisek says. “It’s kind of a rare opportunity to start with a blank canvas, and the goal was to sort of mix [metal and] wood, cold and warmth.”

Other features of the three-story house include two expansive bars, a small deck, and a stone-lined wine cellar sequestered in one basement corner. When chatting about the cellar, Kalisek quips, “This is where they kept the bodies.”

Some might say turning a church into a $2.9 million bachelor pad is sacrilege, or perhaps gentrification. But for Kalisek, a third-generation Idahoan, the project represents an investment in the North End community where he grew up. He was determined to preserve key parts of the church’s history, like the exterior look and poorly-maintained stained glass windows.

“I spent hundreds of hours trying to save those,” he remembers sady. “I have a tendency to go deep into rabbit holes on items, and I did late-night research on stained glass windows and how they’re built. I did everything I could because I thought they were one of the cooler pieces, one of the cooler aspects of that building.”

Stained glass experts in Europe and America ultimately concluded that the windows were beyond repair and in fact were releasing lead oxide. Kalisek’s team removed them, but he hopes to safely donate them to Boise Bible College one day. His team took the building down to the studs, and paid tens of thousands of dollars for lead and asbestos abatement. The renovation process cost far more than the $495,000 North End Devco LLC spent to purchase the property.

“If there’s one thing I learned, it’s never take a hammer to a church,” Kalisek jokes, adding, “no one does this for the money.”

As cliche as it sounds, the final result at 1723 West Eastman Street is clearly a labor of love. Kalisek’s personality fills the home, evident in the John Padlo paintings and Randy Kalisek photographs from his personal collection, the mounted marlin he caught deep-sea fishing off the Mexican coast, and the bright orange garage organizer-turned-bedside table he thrifted after a tough divorce. Those touches and his commitment to quality won the project the 2021 Building Excellence Award in Design and Renovation.

During the process, Kalisek never lost sight of the church’s importance to the neighborhood. He even found ways to bring the community in. During the Christmas holiday in 2020, he invited the neighborhood kids to finger paint on the sheet metal fireplace, accidentally creating a metaphor for the building itself. “That metal, you can paint on it, then sand it back down or grind it back down to whatever you want,” he says. “It’s just a blank canvas.”