How Sacred Heart Church in Highgate became family homes

In Perth’s inner suburbs, old churches often occupy sites that are too valuable to remain untouched and too culturally resonant to be treated as ordinary development parcels. Sacred Heart Church in Highgate presented that exact tension: a substantial place of worship with a recognisable civic presence, yet one that needed a viable future after its original use had ended.

Its conversion into family homes is an exercise in careful adjustment rather than theatrical transformation. The project keeps the emotional weight of the church while introducing the privacy, comfort and adaptability expected of contemporary housing. The result sits between heritage conservation, residential architecture and urban infill.

This kind of adaptive reuse matters in a city where well-located land is under pressure. Retaining a building’s structure can preserve embodied energy, neighbourhood memory and architectural character, while a domestic program gives the site an everyday life. At Highgate, the challenge was to make the former church feel inhabitable without reducing its identity to a decorative backdrop.

A building with memory

Sacred Heart Church was designed for collective experience. Its scale, vertical proportions and formal arrangement would once have directed attention towards worship, ceremony and community gathering. A family home requires a different rhythm: rooms must support cooking, sleeping, working, entertaining and retreating, often within a single continuous plan.

The conversion begins by acknowledging that difference. Instead of pretending the church was always a house, the design allows traces of its former purpose to remain legible. High ceilings, generous openings, masonry surfaces and the overall volume provide a sense of occasion that would be difficult to create in a new suburban dwelling.

That retained character gives each home a strong architectural centre. Domestic life is layered into an existing shell, allowing ordinary routines to unfold against elements that carry a longer history. A hallway, window or exposed wall can therefore work as both a practical feature and a reminder of the building’s public past.

Reading the existing fabric

Adaptive reuse depends on a close reading of what is already there. The most successful interventions distinguish between fabric that should be protected, elements that can be repaired and areas where a new insertion is necessary. This approach avoids the two extremes of freezing a building in time or stripping it back until its original meaning disappears.

At Highgate, the church’s envelope provides the principal framework for the homes. Its external presence remains important to the street, while internal changes introduce the smaller scale required for family living. New partitions and services must work hard in this setting, because every intervention is visible against a large and previously unified interior.

Material decisions help establish a dialogue between old and new. Robust finishes can sit comfortably beside aged masonry, while carefully detailed joinery brings warmth and storage into spaces that may otherwise feel monumental. The contrast is useful: contemporary elements announce the building’s new chapter without imitating its ecclesiastical details.

A similar relationship between one decisive gesture and an entire interior palette can be seen in this single-artwork approach. In the former church, the lesson is broader: a limited, coherent material language can prevent a complex conversion from becoming visually confused.

Making room for family life

The central architectural task is to turn a shared institutional building into a collection of private homes. That means establishing clear thresholds, acoustic separation and useful zones while retaining the qualities that made the church distinctive. The homes need to feel generous, but they also need corners where people can withdraw from the scale of the original interior.

A successful plan usually works through a sequence of compression and release. Entry points, utility spaces and bedrooms can be more contained, opening into larger living areas where the church’s volume becomes an asset. This gives family life a hierarchy rather than placing every activity inside one undifferentiated room.

Natural light is equally important. Existing windows may provide dramatic illumination, although their height and proportions are not automatically suited to domestic use. New openings, internal glazing and carefully positioned rooms can help spread light through the plan without competing with the original facade.

The homes also benefit from a strong relationship with outdoor space. Courtyards, gardens and terraces offer a domestic counterpoint to the church’s interior grandeur, providing places for children to play, meals to move outdoors and residents to experience the seasons. These spaces make the conversion feel residential at the scale of daily life.

Old shell, new interventions

The distinction between retained fabric and new work is essential to the project’s integrity. Contemporary additions do not need to be visually loud, but they should be identifiable as part of the building’s current life. Fine junctions, changes in texture and shifts in scale can communicate this difference more effectively than a dramatic stylistic contrast.

The following design priorities show how the conversion balances heritage character with the practical requirements of a home:

Existing condition Residential response Benefit for family living
Large, high-volume interiors Inserted rooms and built-in joinery Creates privacy, storage and a comfortable human scale
Historic masonry and architectural details Repair, selective exposure and restrained new finishes Preserves memory while avoiding a museum-like atmosphere
Tall or highly formal windows Careful room placement, curtains, glazing and light control Brings in daylight with greater privacy and comfort
Institutional circulation patterns Clear entries, thresholds and domestic zoning Makes movement intuitive for residents and visitors
Limited connection to private gardens Courtyards, terraces and landscaped edges Extends living areas and supports everyday outdoor use
Demands of contemporary services Discreet integration of kitchens, bathrooms, heating and cooling Provides modern performance without overwhelming the old fabric

This balance is especially important in kitchens and bathrooms, where the technical demands of housing are concentrated. These rooms require plumbing, ventilation, appliances and durable surfaces, yet they are also among the most heavily used parts of a home. Integrating them into a former church calls for compact planning and precise detailing.

Joinery becomes a quiet architectural tool. It can divide rooms without building heavy walls, conceal services and provide a sense of enclosure beneath the larger roof volume. In this way, storage is doing more than solving clutter; it helps translate an institutional interior into a sequence of domestic spaces.

Light, landscape and atmosphere

The church’s atmosphere is shaped by more than its visible materials. Sound, shadow and changing daylight contribute to the experience of the interior, and a residential conversion needs to preserve some of that richness while making the rooms comfortable at different times of day.

Soft furnishings, timber, curtains and planting can temper the hard surfaces associated with a former place of worship. They introduce acoustic absorption and tactile warmth, allowing the scale to feel generous rather than echoing. The aim is not to disguise the building’s volume, but to make it hospitable.

Landscape plays a similar role at the edges of the site. Planting can soften boundaries, frame old walls and create privacy between neighbouring homes. It also establishes a transition between the public character of the street and the more relaxed world of family life inside.

The strongest moments are likely to occur where these layers overlap: a living area looking towards a garden, a new stair set against old masonry, or a contemporary kitchen beneath the church’s original roof form. Such encounters make the conversion readable through experience rather than explanation.

A model for inner-city reuse

The Highgate project reflects a wider shift in Australian architecture towards working with existing buildings. Adaptive reuse is increasingly understood as a design opportunity rather than a compromise, particularly in established neighbourhoods where demolition would remove a building with social and environmental value.

For Perth, the approach is especially relevant. The city has a supply of older commercial, civic and religious buildings that can support new uses if planning, conservation and construction are considered together. Family housing introduces a durable program, keeping the site active across the week instead of limiting it to occasional public or ceremonial events.

There are practical benefits for residents, too. Living in a reused building can offer a stronger sense of place than a standard new-build apartment or townhouse. The irregularities of the existing structure, the depth of the walls and the presence of historic details give the homes qualities that cannot be reproduced through surface styling alone.

The project also demonstrates that heritage protection is most effective when it supports meaningful occupation. A building survives culturally when people use it, care for it and adapt it to contemporary needs. Sacred Heart Church remains part of Highgate’s visual and social landscape because its next life is connected to the routines of its residents.

Principles for responsible church conversions

Projects of this kind benefit from a clear set of priorities before design decisions become fixed:

The conversion of Sacred Heart Church shows how a former public building can become intimate without losing its presence. Its success lies in the negotiation between permanence and change: the church’s volume, fabric and memory remain visible, while kitchens, bedrooms, gardens and family rooms give those qualities a practical future.

For readers following the people and practices shaping Western Australian design, Contemporary’s exhibitor profiles offer a wider view of the architects, makers and studios contributing to this conversation. The same questions raised in Highgate—how to retain character, work with existing material and create belonging—continue to influence homes, workplaces and public spaces across the state.

Explore the project through its architecture and photography, then join the local design community at Contemporary Wine In Design with a free event pass. It is an opportunity to see how adaptive reuse, residential design and thoughtful making are shaping Perth’s next architectural chapter.