Rezoning in Valkenswaard. Living in old Antonius van Padua church

Building apartments in an old church is not an everyday project. Although many church buildings come on the market for reuse these days, it requires quite a lot from the parties involved to bring this to a beautiful and profitable end result. In Valkenswaard, CRA Vastgoed, Margry Arts Architects and construction company Huybregts Relou dared to do it. At the end of this year, the eighteen apartments in the former R.C. Antonius van Padua church will be completed.

The iconic building stands at the corner of Eindhovenseweg and Carolusdreef. The basilical church dates from 1921 and was designed in the style of the Delft School. The building is on the List of Cultural Heritage Valuable Objects and has been nominated for monument status. "That also translated into the rezoning. Because of the image-defining character of the church, the facades on Eindhovenseweg and Carolusdreef have been left more or less intact," explains Pascal van Gestel, project manager at construction company Huybregts Relou. "The renovation has had the most impact on the south facade, where we have opened up the facade and built in apartments in terraces."

The starting point for the conversion was the brick church building whose gabled roof is supported by buttresses. The church does not have a tower; the church bell hangs between two buttresses and will not return in the residential use. "To house eighteen apartments in it was no sinecure," Van Gestel said. "A box-in-box construction was chosen. With an old building like this, you know in advance that you can encounter considerable deviations, and that was also the case here. Both in widths and heights and in squareness. The ridge, for example, has a difference in height from front to back of 20 to 25 centimeters, and in width the ridge line runs away by half a meter. With the box-in-box solution, you largely catch problems. We completely replaced the crooked roof with insulated prefab sandwich panels with roof tiles. The temporary open roof also allowed us to continue working logistically."

After all the parts to be demolished were removed, construction and installation began. Van Gestel:
"The shell of the inner box consists of wide slab floors and sand-lime brick walls. Along the walls of the open atrium, where the apartments are accessed, the galleries are suspended from these floors. Metal stud solutions were chosen for the wall finishes of apartments and atrium. So is the gothic arch shape of the atrium. That atrium arose from the fact that churches usually have an awkward width. If you build apartments in them, they do not get enough daylight. An atrium equipped with skylights solves this problem. And the shape has also made it an aesthetically pleasing space."

On Carolusdreef, the façade remained largely intact, only the gothic windows were extended downward into seven-foot-high recesses to allow daylight into the building at ground level as well. "The walls were cut in and new aluminum frames were installed. Again, no window was the same. Customization was not an option because it was too expensive. So some repeating widths were found that we could fit with sufficient tolerance. On the south side, the buttresses remained; the houses are built in between them and step out. The buttress idea can be seen in the piers of the houses. Large aluminum facades for generous daylighting."

By now, all the duplex apartments, which range in size from about 50 to over 160 square meters, have been sold. The appeal of special living has apparently done its work, because the complex work has undoubtedly found its way into the sales prices. Special it will certainly be. The old little chapel at the entrance has been turned into a sanctuary that keeps the past of the Antonius of Padua Church alive. Then you enter the fifteen-meter-high atrium with sight lines running through the entire building. Van Gestel: "This is not an everyday job. It is a learning process for us and for the architect and consultants, especially about what you do and don't want to preserve. In this work, elements were retained that later became finished and invisible. So for a next project, we are going to consider even more carefully at the front end what really stays in view and what doesn't."