Corinne Gerwe and her late husband David were house hunting back in 1991 and decided to investigate Saluda as a potential hometown. That’s when she first saw the 1880s vintage Baptist church that would eventually become her home.
“We drove into Saluda,” she recalls, “and I saw the church and it just called out to me. I said, ‘David, that’s it.’” At first, David resisted the idea, she says, especially when he saw the pink front door. Eventually, he came around, pink motif and all.
“When we bought it, all the furniture was still in it,” she says. “Everything was in bad repair.”
The color scheme was the brain child of Mrs. J.D. Hunt, the former owner. Mrs. Hunt, a flamboyant woman who summered in Saluda, was a 1940s-era spiritualist who favored the art deco styles common to movies of the time.
The building had significance to the former owner, according to Corinne, because it was a church. She decided to turn it into a summer place.
Mrs. Hunt’s tastes were not exactly in tune with the small town of Saluda.
“First of all,” Corinne explains, “she painted the whole inside and trim outside flamingo pink. And she had all of the curtains and bedspreads and ottomans and everything made out of pink-and-white candy stripe material.
“Then she started having parties and she turned the baptismal font into a wet bar and that was all pink. This scandalized the town, because so many of them had gone to Sunday school here and were baptized here.
“When we bought the church, people would come and tell me that they were so glad that I was making the church back into the way it had been. We painted it dove gray and I started decorating it in a way I thought was a bit more appropriate.”
Some of Mrs. Hunt’s spiritualism may linger in the home.
“There’s a feeling in this house,” Corinne says. “I think it’s a good feeling. I’ve had a few people tell me they’ve seen ghosts. In fact, we had a Russian student who lived with us for about nine years. And he still won’t stay here by himself anymore because he said he saw misty forms from the front door all the way through the back when he was here by himself one day.
“Then I had a guest who was sleeping on the porch. He told me he’d seen a woman sitting in the rocking chair when he woke up in the middle of the night…and he was an engineer and was not prone to that sort of thing. I’ve never seen anything like that. I think that Mrs. Hunt had a very positive outlook on life.
“I try to keep the things that were in the house and mix those with the things that I’ve put in it. People stop here all the time. Every time I look out the window, it seems somebody’s sitting out there looking at the house.”
Without a doubt, rehabilitating a century-old building was no easy matter. The new owners knocked out a kitchen wall, added a porch, remade the pink baptismal font/wet bar into a laundry area, added a stairway and an additional floor, as well as another bathroom, installed gutters, built comfortable guest quarters, and redid most of the interior woodwork. Only tiny traces of the old pink paint are visible on the back porch.
During the reconstruction, the old church proved to be extremely durable.
“The construction is incredible,” Corinne says. “There are 30-foot pine beams across the top and wormy chestnut and cedar. It’s made with the finest wood and the only place that was a weak spot was the foundation. It was oak and pine and the bugs had eaten through the wood. The central beam was about ready to go when we bought it. So we hired an exterminator to come and they put a tent over the whole church.”
Most of the work not done by Corinne and her husband was left to Saluda-area carpenter and all-around house doctor Carl Porretto. When he was building the new bathroom, she says, “Everybody in town would come and visit with him through the window while he was working. He’s one of our local treasures. He’s an artist. He does everything.”
Corinne appreciates the resilience and strength of her home, which she shares with a tiny and very quiet dog named Gabby, two talkative doves (Dewey and Penelope) and a large cage of zebra finches.
“This is my last house,” she says. “I lost my husband in 2001 to a drunk driver and I feel like if I take care of the house the house will take care of me. I feel very lucky to be here.”
