Divine Reinvention A historic church building in Little Italy is reimagined as a hip residence for a family of fve. By Diana Bitting Photography by Anthony Tahlier On a quaint, tree-lined street in Little Italy, a turn-of-the-century church sits quietly on a double lot, revealing its latest incarnation. With a cream-colored brick facade, two street-facing gables, stained glass windows in shades of jade, chartreuse and marigold, and a fve-story-tall tower, it is glorious. All around, historic homes from nearly every era—Victorian, Colonial, Italianate—act as refections of their inhabitants and the rich, layered narrative of the neighborhood. In 1901, when this particular southwest part of Chicago saw an infux of Italian immigrants, the building played host to the First Italian Methodist Episcopal Church. A young Italian immigrant from Milan by the name of Giovanni Boschetti was commissioned to compose the architectural scheme for his congregation’s new place of worship, and though the design was beloved by both the church community and local residents, the church closed its doors in 1920. Te site then sat abandoned for decades before the University of Illinois at Chicago purchased it for the purpose of housing various campus ministries from the 1970s to the early 2000s, and renamed it the Agape House. Now, the structure sits on the brink of a new life: a fully modernized seven-bedroom, six-bath home for a family of fve. Interior architect and designer—and furniture fabricator, artist and decorator, among other things—Linc Telen was the conductor of the renovation train, pulling it into the station a little over a year after the demolition date. Te journey included plenty of stops and starts in between. “Tere were a lot of things we discovered once we demo’d,” says Telen. “We didn’t know exactly how the ceiling would go until we tore it of, for example, and the truss line in the main room—we didn’t know how that intersection would work. We just kept uncovering new things every week.”
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