- Bartlett Presbyterian Church was built in 1899 before shutting down in the 1970s.
- Jennifer Tucker helped restore the dilapidated building into a vacation rental with a loft.
- Tucker retained many original features, including the windows and hardwood floors.
Bartlett Presbyterian Church had sat abandoned and dilapidated for decades when Jennifer Tucker found it.
“It had critters living underneath it and there were so many fleas in the building that my feet were covered,” Tucker, 49, told Business Insider. “It was awful.”
The Victorian-style church sits in Bartlett, a small Texas city with about 1,600 residents. Although the steeple on the Victorian-style church survived, the paint had peeled, windows shattered, and the building leaned slightly to the left.
Still, Tucker was enchanted.
“It spoke to me. It really did keep me up at night,” Tucker said of the church. “It was still beautiful in its own little weathered old lady way.”
Tucker owns the real-estate brokerage Amazing Realty and is enthusiastic about historic preservation. She transformed the old church — now dubbed Heavenly Hideaway — into a one-bedroom vacation rental with a loft and several original features mixed in with new amenities available for $136 a night.
Keep reading to learn how Tucker transformed a 125-year-old church into a guest-favorite Airbnb.
