Bank Turned Luxury Home

Inside a Bank Turned Luxury Home

by

Kayla Cozad

 

      This article I have found is from the site CNN Money where a former bank teller bought her old workplace in 1989 and turned it into a spectacular home , complete with a bar in one vault and a sauna in the other.

The new owner of this bank Cathy Calhoun bought the bank for 52,000 dollars and took 24 years to transform this bank, built in 1872 into a spectacular home. The bank is located in Spring City, Pa; the space includes a fully stocked bar, a sauna and an entertaining space in the old lobby. What Ms. Calhoun did to this old bank now has a total of about 5,200 square-feet of living space. There are three bedrooms and three baths, with many old fixtures and spaces that have been kept and reimagined. For instance, Calhoun turned the old "coupon room," where affluent bank clients used to clip coupons from their bearer bonds, into a powder room. Also one of the old vaults has been turned into a fully stocked bar, Ms. Calhoun removed a wall of safe deposit boxes to free up seating room, but left the other wall of boxes intact. Calhoun in the process found many interesting things and saved some of the trinkets into a display as memorabilia. Calhoun also removed the dropped ceiling, restored the lobby's soaring 40-foot height and repaired the original coffers and skylight

(She also hired a ceiling painter to duplicate the pink clouds and baby blue skies commonly seen in the Pennsylvania countryside at sunset. She kept the old double entrance doors but playfully gold-lettered "Calhoun Federal" on them. Potential customers still knock on the doors to inquire about banking services. She transformed the old boardroom to a bedroom .

Ms. Calhoun left the entryway to the old boardroom intact and made it her master suite. She had to do very little to restore the bedroom area. She just had it spackled and painted, and added a large, luxurious bath. A second fault was turned into a sauna with a door from the original vault. 

( There's also a hidden room in the basement where, the local historical society believes, the old bank note printing press survives. The old brass and the steel vault doors only need to be cleaned with a bit of Windex, the marble and granite walls covered with layers of dark grime. They cleaned up real nice, though, even revealing the veining in the marble. The walls are three-feet thick and keep the home cool in the summer and warm in winter.

Some fun information about this vault is the old vault has a dark history. In 1921, seven bank robbers herded seven bank directors, two employees and two customers into the unventilated space.

“When the original Seth Thomas street clock that used to project out over the front doors was returned it to its place of honor, the unveiling attracted half the town. "People were crying," said Calhoun. "They remembered as children telling time by the clock."

                                  Bibliography

 Christie, Les. “Inside a bank turned luxury home, $52,000 and 24 years of renovations.”

            Money, CNN. 1 Nov. 2013.
            http://money.cnn.com/gallery/real_estate/2013/11/01/bank-home/index.html