St Mark’s, at 1120 Greendale Road in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, is a genuine Edmund Blacket church — the same colonial architect behind St Andrew’s Cathedral and parts of the University of Sydney — built between 1848 and 1849 to serve a farming community of over 200 people. Wheat rust, a cyclone in 1903, and the slow decline of the village did what a century of Sundays couldn’t, and the church closed as a place of worship in 1929. It’s spent the decades since being sympathetically, and enthusiastically, converted into somebody’s actual home. Is it a church, is it a house? It’s a chouse.
The ground floor keeps most of the original bones — lancet windows, a stone belfry, sandstone walls a metre thick in places — and adds two separate fireplaces, wall-to-wall red carpet, and a bugle sitting by the hearth that nobody has explained and we’re not going to ask about. We do have questions about why red carpet was ever this popular an interior choice, historically speaking, but we respect the commitment. A second floor was added later, along with dormer windows, a south-facing verandah, and a glazed sunroom extension, all handled carefully enough that the join between 1849 and now is genuinely hard to spot.
The property is actually split into three distinct zones, and the one doing the most heavy lifting is what we’re calling the entertainment wing — a separate ground-floor section built around a full theatre pipe organ, sitting on its own dais under a soaring timber-lined ceiling, with a mezzanine gallery of built-in speaker cabinets stacked above it. And really, what’s more entertaining than a full cathedral organ at full belt? Elsewhere, tucked into a hallway, there’s a stained-glass door depicting two flamingos. Not saints, not lilies, not doves — flamingos. It’s never been a genre of ecclesiastical glasswork before and, frankly, it should have been all along. As for where you’d actually put a bed in a building this openly cathedral-shaped, we have no idea, and neither, presumably, will you, at least not without wondering whether anyone’s still watching.
The agent’s copy leans into weddings, boutique B&B potential, and events hosting, which, fair enough — soaring Gothic interiors and 1.5 acres of landscaped grounds do lend themselves to it. But we’d argue the real pitch here is simpler: it’s a genuine 177-year-old Blacket church you can just live in, red carpet and all. Potential to start your own religion is, as far as we can tell, entirely optional.
