He was around 11 or 12-years-old the first time he got the opportunity to press his face to its windows. Dave Kooi and his grandmother had driven to town from Cambridge, probably on their way to K-Mart. When he saw the building on Main Street, he asked his grandmother to stop, and she did, pulling her red station wagon up to the curb. It was around 1976 or 1977, and the building served as a church. A young Kooi scrambled out of the car and ran around the property peering into all of the building’s expansive windows.
“I had always had an affinity to architecture and shape and form,” said Kooi.
The building at 300 S. Main Street in Kewanee with its jutting roofline and mid-century architecture does demand a certain amount of attention. But It would be decades, not until around 2018, that he would finally get a chance to step inside.
Kooi was born in Illinois in Gibson City. The son of the pastor, Dale Kooi, the family moved around, living in “all sorts of places” like Melvin, Urbana, Peoria, London, England, Havana, and Pana.
“My mother, Carol Kooi, was born in Cambridge so we were in this area during these moves, years and experiences,” he said. “My constant was this Henry County area-Cambridge and of course Kewanee being the closest bigger town to visit and shop.”
Kooi graduated from Havana High School in 1983 and attended Bradley University in Peoria, graduating in 1987. From there, it was on to work and live in Connecticut. In July of 1992, his parents moved on from Pana to Kewanee.
Kooi spent the next 30 years living in both Connecticut and then in Southern California.
He worked in the field of journalism in Connecticut for many years at The Manchester Herald as a news photographer. Later he would join Meriden Record Journal and then the Hartford Courant. He moved to California and worked in 2001 at the Orange County Register, before landing a job with the Walt Disney Corporation in the press and publicity department as the PR photography manager at the Disneyland Resort. Later he would work with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online as manager of internet strategy and business management.
In 2016, he moved away from Southern California to Kewanee, where his parents had returned.
“It was time to come back,” he said. “My father had Alzheimer’s and it became necessary to have someone closer. That’s what brought me home.”
For the next several years, Kooi worked locally taking jobs for various businesses. He even did a stint in the local emergency room, a job he said he enjoyed.
“I was the person behind the scenes. I became masterful at managing people’s insurance,” he said.
He was also energized helping people and became adept at managing both insurance and patient data.
Kooi said when he first moved back, he was completely absorbed in his life, but every once in a while, he would drive past the building on Main Street and feel the pull.
“I felt really sorry for it,” he said.
The building at the corner of South Main and Lyle was designed by Chicago architect Stuart Phillips and constructed in 1962. It was originally the First Church of Christ Scientists. The first service was held there that year right before Christmas. In 1964, a Star Courier article reported on the church’s dedication on May 10. Over the years, the building has been used for several businesses, including acting as the base of operations for a cellular phone company, Total Connexions, in 2003.
Around 2017 or early 2018, Kooi called the number on the hand-painted sign in the yard at 300 S. Main, and was finally able to get inside the building.
On the exterior, weeds overtook the landscape, empty liquor bottles were strewn around, and plywood covered the windows. The interior was just as bad. The outside had come in and vines grew up the stone walls. Snakes and other critters had made it their home at one time or another. There were active water leaks and the gas and electric had long been disconnected. But Kooi admits he missed the opportunity to make it his. The property was sold to Tom Greiner in June of 2018.
In 2019, another opportunity presented itself to him and that time, he didn’t let it slip away. He had mentioned to Mary Jo Gibson with Mel Foster that he always wished he had the opportunity to buy the property. In December of 2019, for the price of $15,000, it was his.
“I had all of these exciting ideas,” he said, but it was winter and without heat or electricity, he knew he would have to wait. “I didn’t know what to do next. I thought, ‘I’ll restore it.’”
Then COVID hit, shelving most of his dreams of what the space could be.
“But the joy from working on the building kept me sane during our lockdowns,” he said. “It became my COVID sanity project. It was my play space. I didn’t have to be around anyone.
A new roof, and gutting the office that had been built inside gave me a clean slate to play with.”
After exploring more ideas on utilizing the space, he settled on making it his office and design studio. When he first began, the building had been converted to some sort of office, but his vision was a complete restoration. He wanted to return the building to its former glory.
“I purchased the building in 2019, with no real plans – I had an affinity for the building as a child. My goal was to get it functional again, a kind of restoration,” he said.
What the building needed was a new beginning, so he brought in a dumpster and started pitching.
“I wanted to start fresh,” he said.
Once empty, the building revealed its intended design to him.
“I really noticed after the building was cleaned out that it reminded me of the shape and forms of the modernist homes of Guadalajara, and specifically work by the architect Luis Barragán, who incorporated flat planes of vivid colors – well and I also adore his work,” he said. “They are so beautiful and famous, with blocks of color. I was really inspired by the raw, strange shapes and colors.”
He made a model of the building to help visualize the colors and chose the blue, orange, and red to work with the stone, he said.
“Being built in 1962 one could truly call this a Mid-Century building, but in my opinion, it is also (art brut) or brutalist, coming from baton brut, meaning raw concrete in French,” said Kooi.
He paid a contractor to restore the utilities. It needed a new roof and other things beyond his skill set, but the rest of the restoration and interior design, including the two bathrooms, he did himself.
“I had a great amount of joy taking care of this,” he said.
The entire restoration didn’t take long. By early spring of 2020, he had wrapped up the project.
“It was ready for me to have fun in it,” he said. “I was shocked at how fast I can do things.”
Kooi staged the building with mostly mid-century furnishings.
“The interior has super fun furniture including a bent plywood dining set by Thaden-Jordan, a Mies Barcelona chair and ottoman, Noguchi Coffee table, and a Castiglioni brothers’ Arch Lamp designed the same year as the church in 1962.”
The Thaden-Jordan set is from 1947, and feels jarring in design, but Kooi thought it worked in the space.
“It just seemed to fit here,” he said.
A nine-foot long desk and Lego table with hairpin legs that occupies the main room are his own creations.
But after several years of using the space as an office, Kooi said he’s now ready to move on. He currently works as the Senior Account Manager for a marketing firm, Digital4Startups.com in Chicago, and no longer needs the space, though his clients and co-workers loved it.
“I don’t really need this office since I work remotely,” he said. “We’re all over the world, I can work anywhere and I also need a project.”
The building is currently listed for $74,900 and after it was featured on a Facebook page, “Cheap Old Houses” in a post that read: “Too swank not to share,” it went viral, drawing attention from prospective buyers from all over the world. It’s already under-contract.
“I’ve saved the building. It’s protected and it will live on,” said Kooi. “The building served its purpose and it gave something back to me.”
Kooi’s father passed away in August of 2020, and his body was donated to the University of Illinois Medical School for research. In 2022, his father’s ashes were returned and Kooi used the space at 300 S. Main for a public reception and memorial before his father’s ashes were interred at Rosedale Cemetery in Cambridge.
The use of the former Church of Christ Scientist building for his father’s memorial gathering was truly the apex of his interaction with the beautiful space, as well as his inspiration to let it go, he said. But it’s not the building that has made Kooi decide to move on, but rather the thought of his next big adventure.
“It’s not a burden to me. It’s just time for me to do something else. I always have to have a dream,” he said.
