Some people spend their entire lives living in one home, some don’t stay in one place long enough for anywhere to feel like home, and others get an opportunity just once in their lifetime to live in an exceptionally unique building dripping with history.
Tony and Julie Mercer didn’t deliberately to seek out a former church to live in.
When Julie, a former newspaper photographer, found herself assigned to a job at one that was for sale, however, the idea of making it her own couldn’t be shaken.
After being passed in at auction, she inquired how ‘her’ house was going each time she ran into the selling agent.
Without preaching to Tony, she took him to an open home at the church house and he too began to worship the thought of purchasing the thoughtfully renovated building.
Despite his own mum briefly owning an old church at Whroo, Tony hadn’t considered buying his own until that moment.
The house was once Kialla’s Methodist Church, built in 1938.
It was sold privately to potter Ray Maloney in 1973 after the congregation had waned so much it was unsustainable to keep operating as a church.
Ray renovated the building into a residential residence, staying faithful to many of its original design elements, including the arched Gothic windows and doorways.
The original high timber-lined and vaulted ceiling towers above two open-plan levels.
The mezzanine areas on one side lend themselves to sleeping quarters.
On the other, a library and reading area are accessed by a spiral staircase, where the retired couple often retreat for hours on end consumed in books in the winter when the fire below warms the space cosily.
The Mercers, who have religiously attended a Dookie church every Sunday for years, joke that they’re such devoted faithfuls that they go to church every day now.
Since they purchased the property 26 years ago, they’ve added their own touches to it.
They pulled up some carpet to reveal timber boards that they then polished, rendered and painted parts of the outside of the buildings, and renovated the bathroom, including a beautiful old clawfoot bath they reclaimed from a paddock and restored to glory as a feature.
Inspired by a trip Julie and jazz-loving Tony took to New Orleans in 2023, the couple painted some inside walls a calming, soft blue; a folklore tradition of Louisianians said to ward off “haints” (ghosts) by mimicking the sky or water, which spirits can’t cross.
But it’s not just the building itself that retains a rich religious history.
The Mercers have collected several artefacts from nearby churches to furnish their holy home.
There’s pews from the Caniambo church, a busker’s organ from St David’s Uniting Church, a hymn board from the Tallygaroopna West Uniting Church that still has the hymn cards in place from its final service, and an altar table from the Invergordon Uniting Church, which the couple poetically signed their marriage register at in 1974.
The Methodist church’s original pulpit was also returned home when an Altona man dropped by one day to donate it back to the Mercers.
As art and history collectors, the pair have religious-themed paintings that fit charmingly with their religious decor among their collection, such as a Carolyn Marrone watercolour of a nun they picked up from the Tatura Art Show.
Julie, an artist herself, paints in a huge mud-brick studio next to the church house that was formerly Ray Maloney’s pottery, The Mud Factory.
Over the years, that space has also been used for band practice, parties and as a teenager’s retreat.
The Mercers said their spiritual sanctuary had offered them a welcome retreat of relaxation in their almost three decades living there.
“Living out of town, only minutes out of town and you’re in peace,” Tony said.
“You get the benefit of country living but close to town.”
“You walk through the back gate and it’s immediately peaceful being surrounded with the trees, birds and animals,” Julie added.
Though rural, the block is under half an acre in size and easy to maintain.
The Mercers spent their first 10 years at the property in drought, so they proofed their garden with hardy flora varieties and replaced lawns with crushed granite, which they suspect has also been a deterrent for snakes who don’t enjoy the sensation on their skin.
In pleasant weather, they share time in their shady garden taking in the uninterrupted views towards the river across the surrounding paddocks dotted with alpacas and sheep and are often visited by native wildlife, such as kangaroos, echidnas and possums.
They say it’s been a blessing to live in a home with such architectural uniqueness, but now the time has come for them to scale down and move into an even lower-maintenance retirement village.
Despite turning a new page in their life’s holy book, the quirky building will be hard to leave.
Its future will be, bittersweetly, out of their hands.
“The next person might also enjoy 26 years living here,” Julie said.
“Or, it might be turned into something else completely.”