Marysville, Ohio
Church to Home
A church-to-home conversion in Marysville, Ohio, keeping the bell tower, vaulted sanctuary, and arched windows while fitting a new second floor under the roof.
The project
This adaptive reuse project turns a decommissioned church in Marysville's traditional village grid into a single-family home. It keeps the bell tower, gabled roof, and arched windows, then fits a new second floor with three bedrooms under the original roofline.
Converting a church into a single-family home
A church comes with fixed rules. The bell tower, the vaulted sanctuary, and the gabled roof give the building its identity, and they also set the limits of any new plan. The design worked inside them rather than around them.
Three priorities shaped the conversion: keep the building's defining elements, add usable living area, and hold the building's relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. Every move in the plan answers at least one of the three.
The tower and the roof stay.
The street should still know this building.
The sanctuary becomes the great room
The heart of the church becomes the heart of the house. The vaulted sanctuary is now an open kitchen, living, and dining space, and the vaulted ceiling sits at the center of daily life.
The rest of the first floor organizes around it: a front office, a powder room, a mudroom, and a mechanical core. The practical rooms a house needs are all on this level, gathered around the main space rather than competing with it.
A second floor inside the original roof
The church never had bedrooms, so the house needed room the original building did not provide. A new second-floor plate creates it within the existing shell. Side dormers and new windows bring light to that level and open more of the roof volume to use, while the street profile holds.
Upstairs are three bedrooms, including the primary suite, two bathrooms, and a sunlit hall. Adding area inside the envelope, instead of beside it, kept the footprint and the silhouette the neighborhood already knew.
An arched church window in the primary suite
The primary suite sits behind one of the church's original arched windows. Kept in place, it fills the room with daylight and gives the most private space in the house a direct link to the building's past. An ensuite bath completes the suite.
Durable materials for an old building
Hardie board siding, dimensional asphalt shingles, and Marvin windows give the exterior durable, familiar materials at the scale of the former church. The result is a quiet reset of the exterior that stays continuous with the neighborhood around it.
Modern systems make the building work as a house. The completed home still shows the bell tower, the vaulted ceiling, and the arched windows, and the new residential rooms sit inside the church's original shell.