'Beautifully preserved': $5.5m heritage-listed Armadale church awaits its second coming
On Melbourne’s most popular retail strip, high-end shopping and lifestyle are religion. Just metres away, buyers are circling to snap up the suburb’s next adaptive reuse project.
Brimming with soaring cathedral ceilings, timber floors, arched lead-light windows, and an ornate red brick exterior, a heritage-listed church around the corner from Armadale’s busy High Street precinct awaits its afterlife.
The Armadale Wesleyan Church is looking for creative buyers for the place of worship at 86b Kooyong Road, seven kilometres south-east of the CBD.
Early interest in the Terry & Oakden-designed early-English-Gothic-style church has been in excess of $5.5 million, according to CVA Property Consultants.
Armadale, one of the city’s most affluent suburbs, has long been known for its leafy streets, top-tier schools and heritage homes, and has a median house price of $2.6 million. High Street has “evolved into one of Melbourne’s most curated commercial and lifestyle precincts”, CVA says.
While high-end High Street shopping could be considered a religion to some, to others it’s just a pit stop at boutique retail giants such as Mecca, Cos and The Memo, or to renowned butcher and eatery Victor Churchill, Phillippa’s Bakery or Albert’s Wine Bar.
The street was last year named the most popular shopping strip in Melbourne in a Fitzroy retail report, and has become a magnet for design studios, consulting firms, boutique medical and wellness operators, and strata-office developers.
“Without a doubt, High Street, Armadale, is the most in-demand strip in Melbourne – and possibly Australia,” Fitzroys’ Lewis Wadell said on the release of the annual Walk the Strip report.
Just 400 metres down Kooyong Road from High Street, the Wesleyan Church property includes the historically significant church and a hall.
It also boasts an already converted and tenanted office space that offers immediate income.
While the church, hall, spire and brick boundary wall are considered of heritage value, the building linking the church and hall is not, as it was added about 30 years ago.
The 1438-square-metre corner block on a residential street could be reimagined as apartments due to its general residential zoning, which also allows for a variety of non-residential uses to serve community needs – such as a school, tertiary education, cafe, art gallery or function centre.
Its adaptive-reuse second coming is anyone’s guess as the campaign heats up.
The property, being marketed via an expressions-of-interest campaign, has already attracted a “really good” response, says agent Daniel Philip, CVA’s director of sales.
“We’ve had a good amount of inquiry coming across various different platforms,” he says. “What’s pleasing to note is the very different buyer profiles, both locally and interstate.”
Creative owner-occupiers, value-adders, long-term investors, and those interested in residential conversion have been drawn to the cavernous and historically well-preserved open space, Philip adds.
“It is interesting, in the Armadale precinct, that there have been quite a few churches similar to this which have been converted,” he says.
He says potential buyers – including open-minded architects – have inspected the church and envisioned its new calling.
“They walked through the front church, which is about eight-and-a-half metres high, and imagined running a second floor across the whole length of the building,” Philip says. “Then they divide them up into two-level apartment townhouses.”
Philip says the former place of worship also offers a flexible floor plan. This allows “a place to work, create, gather or grow.”
The site is close to public transport, including Armadale train station and Glenferrie Road trams, with multiple routes to choose from.
Ian Angelico, co-agent and managing director at CVA Property Consultants, describes the blue-chip property as “beautifully preserved”.
“This site is brilliantly positioned to be the kind of rare landmark asset that’ll have design-lovers praying it’s still available,” he says.
Elsewhere in the blue-chip suburb of Armadale, the Denbigh Road Presbyterian Church was repurposed into eight award-winning boutique apartments designed by Catt Architects. One apartment was sold in 2020 for $1.655 million.
Other church conversions include: a Gladstone Street, Moonee Ponds, church repurposed into a cafe; a St Kilda church vestry made into a two-bedroom apartment; a Prahran church partially converted into office space; a Carlton church turned into a multipurpose community venue; and several Fitzroy churches repurposed as apartments and a luxury home with a six-car garage.
The Kooyong Road church was opened in 1881, with the land funded by notable landholder and Premier of Victoria James Munro, who laid the foundation stone in May 1886.
The site features a “remarkable” set of 21 stained memorial windows from a Denbigh Road church, each of which commemorates a member of the congregation or a significant event.
It is also home to a rare organ built between 1912 and 1914, considered a significant example of early 20th-century craftsmanship.
The property is being sold via an expressions-of-interest campaign closing at 3pm on Thursday, August 21.
