This Week's Find: A Church Turned Ballet School Turned Home in New Orleans

• November 24th 2014

by Lark Turner

In this edition of This Week’s Find, we head south for a tour of a unique home on the market in New Orleans.

---

An ornate home in New Orleans that was first a Presbyterian church, then a ballet school, and now a residence hit the market this fall for $2.6 million. The home at 1527 Harmony Street (map) is just off St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans’ Historic Garden District.

Owner James P. McNamara converted the old church building into a residence over the past 15 years with the help of his wife. The couple are only the third owners of the building since it was constructed in 1925, and the first to live in it, McNamara told UrbanTurf. The main home has about 10,000 square feet with three bedrooms and 3.5 baths. The ceilings throughout rise 26 feet high. Three one-bedroom apartments in other parts of the property bring in more than $1,000 a month each in rent.

The couple bought the church building in 1999 for about $500,000, according to property records, and began renovations. They’re still not quite done, as McNamara writes on a blog post documenting the property’s rehab:

“With a project this large, we always moved forward on things that we both agreed on,” he said. “Then there are projects that we didn’t agree — should the first floor waterfall be a metal sculptured wall or a glass one or a green one? There’s been a bit of a waiting game between us to see who will change their mind and in some cases that hasn’t happened yet.”

Here are a few more photos of the property:

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/this_weeks_find_a_church_turned_ballet_school_turned_home_in_new_orleans/9259.