A century-old Lutheran church at the corner of Wolcott and Cornelia avenues in Roscoe Village has been converted into a 10,000-square-foot single-family home, and it just hit the market for $6.5 million. The five-bedroom, six-bathroom estate includes a bell tower reachable by an interior staircase, 25-foot vaulted ceilings, and a nave that now functions as the home's living room.
The property at 1901 W. Cornelia Ave. was built in 1910 for the English Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension, which owned and operated the building for nearly a century, according to historical church records cited by Dignity Memorial. As reported by The Real Deal, the congregation sold the structure in 1999 to antiques dealer Joseph Partipilo for $134,500. Partipilo, who ran Olde Chicago Antiques on Belmont Avenue, spent about 25 years living in and improving the building before the shop eventually relocated to a larger warehouse in Avondale on North Kedzie Avenue and later to Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
Partipilo listed the church-turned-home ahead of his retirement to Wisconsin, per the same account. The building sits on a double lot spanning more than two Chicago city lots, a rare land configuration that helps explain both its scale and its price tag, according to historical context from Baird & Warner.
Inside the $2 Million Renovation
The home was remodeled in 2020 and includes two full kitchens, four full bathrooms, two half bathrooms, sub-slab radiant heating, historic radiators, a catering kitchen, and an attached two-car garage, according to MLS listing details published by Choose City Living. Herringbone quarter-sawn oak floors run throughout the converted sanctuary. The Real Deal's reporting notes the property was previously marketed privately in September 2022 for $5.5 million following a reported $2 million interior renovation, though it did not sell at that time, based on a Facebook post from that period.
Cook County property tax records show the home carried an $18,160 annual tax bill in 2023 on an assessed value of $89,385, per Redfin. That figure contrasts sharply with the Cook County Assessor's 2026 market value estimate of $1.82 million for the property, illustrating how far county assessments can lag behind open-market luxury pricing.
A Roscoe Village Market Running Hot
Listing agent Luke Blahnik of @properties Christie's International Real Estate, who has 20 years of experience as a broker, said the home is priced competitively in line with new construction in Roscoe Village. Blahnik expects trophy properties like this one to draw interest from international buyers, though it remains an open question whether the eventual buyer will be a local family drawn by the neighborhood's schools or a collector seeking unique architectural volume.
The $6.5 million ask, which works out to about $650 per square foot, towers over recent neighborhood activity. Roscoe Village posted a median sale price of $937,000 over the past three months, with a median price per square foot of roughly $427 — up nearly 7 percent from a year earlier, per The Real Deal's market data. Thirty-two homes sold in the area during that span, typically spending 35 days on the market. Separate reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times found that 63.4% of Roscoe Village homes sold above list price in August 2026, with 53% selling in seven days or less — evidence of just how competitive the broader market has become even as this listing sits at an entirely different price tier.
Preserving Chicago's Aging Churches
Other market data puts the church conversion's outlier status in even starker relief: single-family homes across Roscoe Village averaged a median sale price of $1.25 million in late 2025, meaning the Cornelia Avenue listing is asking roughly five times the neighborhood norm, according to figures compiled by Gold Coast Realty. The home also falls within the attendance boundaries for Audubon Elementary School, a Chicago Public Schools neighborhood campus, per ez Home Search — a detail likely to matter to any family-buyer considering the property.
The conversion also fits into a wider preservation trend playing out across Chicago. Preservation Chicago has backed adaptive reuse of historic neighborhood churches as a way to save aging masonry landmarks from demolition as congregation sizes shrink citywide, the advocacy group notes. Structures like the century-old Cornelia Avenue sanctuary illustrate how residential conversion can offer a financial lifeline for religious buildings that might otherwise be torn down.
Even at $6.5 million, the listing remains well below the region's current high-water mark. The most expensive residential sale recorded in the Chicago area through August 2026 was a Glencoe mansion that sold for $17.5 million, according to regional luxury real estate reporting. Whether the Roscoe Village church finds its buyer among local families or trophy-hunting collectors, its bell tower and vaulted nave now stand as one of the more unusual offerings in Chicago's North Side housing market.
