Worshipful spaces: are these London's most beautiful chapel conversions? 

For a buyer with £6m in search of a true one-off home, The Chapel – the jewel in the crown of Berkeley’s St Joseph’s Gate development in Mill Hill – takes some beating. From the moment you enter the building’s 49ft-long orangery (dressed as a breakfast room) and get a glimpse of the vast main space that lies ahead, you know you are in for a treat. 

Forget new-build properties, which - even when designed to extreme levels of luxury - follow a fairly formulaic layout. This Grade II-listed, 8,000 square foot chapel – built in 1866 as a seminary for priests, and more recently became a film set for the BBC series Call the Midwife – is full of the unexpected, from a hidden staircase and an altar in one of the bathrooms to the show-stopping guest bedroom that floats in a glass pod about 25 feet above the main living space. 

Fortunately for prospective buyers, most of whom would be lost as how to furnish a living area that’s nearly 90 feet long with a 45-foot-high ceiling, The Chapel is being sold as seen, designed, furnished and dressed by Alexander James Interiors. 

In some ways, the building presented its designers with the ultimate blank canvas. With these dimensions, they could experiment in ways that would be unimaginable in a home of normal proportions. Stacey Sibley, Alexander James’s creative director, talks of needing to make it “feel like a home, not a public place”, to add warmth, softness and “a homely feel”, which she did with touches such as herringbone floors, inlaid carpet in the dining area, and lots of luxurious velvet and silk voile drapes. 

Sibley also had to work around the historical quirks of the listed building – a prescribed palette for the walls and, “a massive challenge”, how to make the lower ground floor, with its standard ceiling heights, feel like it belongs to the same home as the awe-inspiring chapel. 

The ground floor has been left open-plan, letting nothing detract from the sense of volume, with demarcated zones for dining, a family snug area, the bespoke Pedini kitchen and the lounge in the rotunda. Subtle supersizing ensures the furnishings aren’t dwarfed by their surroundings. Specially-made sofas follow the curve of the 15 windows that frame the lounge and there are vases so vast they would skim the ceilings of ordinary homes. Even the diffusers are Jeroboam-sized, each wafting 4.5 litres of Culti fragrance. 

Above the staircase, a huge bespoke chandelier points downstairs to the leisure lair that will give its millionaire buyer plenty of reasons never to leave home, including a home cinema, large gym and a plush boutique hotel-style sauna and steam room. The Chapel also comes with two private terraces and the run – like all residents at St Joseph’s Gate – of seven acres of landscaped areas and fields, with hilltop views for miles across London. 

This is a trophy property, undoubtedly, because of its uniqueness and price. And there are plenty of lifestyle props dotted around to hint at who its creators think/hope will live here, from the Laurent Perrier in the champagne bucket sunken into the 15-foot circular breakfast bar, to the Ralph Lauren clothes and Harvey Nics boxes lining the master bedroom.  

“It’s a party house – maybe for a very successful musician or film director, who wants an entertainment space,” says Berkeley sales and marketing director Sarah Boyce. “But while we thought most interest would come from uber-rich foreign buyers wanting a showpiece second home, we have actually received a lot of interest from families living locally,” she adds. “Living in such a unique property won’t be to everyone’s liking, but people are in awe of the impressive, vast spaces and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a home such as this.”

Down the road in Hampstead, amid the huge mansions of NW3, is a chapel at a very different point in its conversion. Part of Mount Anvil’s Hampstead Manor scheme – the regeneration of 19th-century Kidderpore Hall and its surrounding Grade II-listed buildings, along with eight new-build apartment blocks and houses – this classical chapel was built by Westfield College in 1929. Most recently it was used by students as an occasional basketball court and was on the verge of collapse. 

Now it is being given a new lease of life by interior architects Bowler James Brindley, who have redesigned the derelict chapel as a high-luxury four-bedroom home, on sale for £7.5m. The existing chapel will house the main living area, dining area and kitchen, along with a cinema room, while the bedrooms will live in a modern extension that doubles the building’s existing size to 5,000 square feet. 

“When the chapel was built over a century ago, it was non-denominational and the brief was to make it small and simple, but in a residential context it is anything but. The main room is 15 metres long, 7.5 metres high and eight metres wide. We are fixing it and restoring it to its former glory while also delicately inserting the trappings of a 21st-century luxury residence,” says Stephen Crawley of Bowler James Brindley. 

Part of the joy of such a building, says Crawley, is to look down upon its sheer volume, so he has designed a large piece of bespoke joinery that sits at one end of the chapel, where the altar would have been. It houses a contemporary kitchen with secret cabinetry and a concealed staircase leading up to a mezzanine level, where you will be able to peer down from TV den and library. There will also be a view down into the chapel from one of the bedrooms, through an existing window “that provides the connection between old and new,” says Crawley. 

Bowley James Brindley are dressing the chapel as “a serving suggestion”, says Crawley, but the soft furnishings aren’t included in the sales price. “There are plenty of opportunities for the buyer to have a lot of fun and make a statement, with some fabulous light fittings,” Crawley comments. 

These London chapels are rarities that will appeal to niche buyers. As Mount Anvil’s sales director Jon Hall puts it: “You can buy a four- or five-bed semi around here for £6m. This is a one-of-its-kind home with huge amounts of history that none of the other buildings have.” 

The owner will have the added perk of access to the amenities at Hampstead Manor, including a Johnson Ribolla-designed swimming pool and gym and a "town car" to ferry residents to the Tube. As Stephen Crawley describes, “they will also have the luxury of arriving at the chapel door and walking down one of two staircases into a spectacular space that they will call home”. 

When home looks like these two London chapels, their owners may find their friends are keener church-goers than they ever let on.