A building built
to serve one purpose,
destined to serve another.

Main Street, Clarkston

It was a church for about a hundred and fifty years.

The white clapboard building with the bell tower went up in the 1840s and spent a century and a half as a Baptist church — weddings, funerals, potlucks, the whole run of a small town's life, held in one room.

In the 1970s the congregation modernized. Among other things, they covered over the stained glass. By the time the building came up for sale it had been sitting long enough that its future was genuinely in question, and Curt Catallo's parents bought it for the simple reason that somebody had to.

1995 · The restoration

Ann Stevenson went looking for what had been covered up.

Curt and Ann were, by her own description, “silly and young enough to think it was a good idea.” A church does not obviously want to be a restaurant. What she saw instead was the room: cathedral ceilings, tall windows, natural light falling a long way down.

So the design brief was archaeological rather than decorative. Pews stayed and became booths. The stained glass came back out from behind the 1970s. What went in around it — the industrial pendant lamps, the Modern Cabins neon, the disco ball hanging in a Gothic arch, a Bowie print on a wall of framed odds and ends — was chosen to sit alongside the building's history rather than paper over it.

Thirty years on, Ann Stevenson Studio has done the interiors for every restaurant the family has opened since.

How it went

A hundred and eighty years, briefly.