Ornate Devon convent going down - piece by lovely piece

Crows in hand, crowds this morning will strip the doomed Regina Mundi Priory of its architectural delights

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Susan Weidener
Inquirer Suburban Staff

DEVON - Ron Haney was at the old Tudor-style priory on Waterloo Road at 2 p.m. sharp yesterday with dozens of other tape-measure-wielding home-renovation scavengers.

By 2:30, he had fixed on four square stained-glass windows depicting medieval knights’ helmets, which for 50 years until December had colored the light falling on praying nuns.

“This,” he said, “would look terrific in my dining room.”

Haney’s coming back with his wallet and crowbar today, hoping to grab what he calls “an incredible bargain.”

He won’t be alone as the contents of the Regina Mundi Priory go up for grabs at a pre-demolition sale from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“If you come here Saturday at 8 a.m. and you don’t see 500 people here, I’d be extremely surprised,” Said Kevin Tobin, the Villanova contractor who’s handling the sale.

The priory’s nuns, who had maintained an etheral, nearly mystical presence in Devon for a half-century, moved out earlier this year, selling the house to a developer, Hill Custom Homes, based in Havertown.

The 1905-vintage mansion, which had been donated to the Order of the Benedictines of Jesus Crucified in 1955 by the W. R. Grace family, will be bulldozed Wednesday to make way for 10 luxury homes that will go up on the 21-acre lot. Demolishers held an open-house preview yesterday, showing off an ornate grand staircase ($12,000), which elegantly angled its way around the house’s central open space; room-sized wood paneliing in rare quarter sawn white oak ($7,000); a leaded-glass bay window ($3,000) and wooden stair hadnrails ($5).

The dozens of vehicles that began clogging the priory’s drive yesterday marked a dramatic contrast, neighbors said, from the decades during which the nuns kept the lush tract under leafy wraps.

“It was almost like they weren’t there,” said Howard Flaxman, an Easttown Township supervisor. “The sisters didn’t participate much in the community,” he said.

The monastic life, said the prioress, Sister Marie Rita, was such that the nuns - many of which were disabled - came out in public only once a year, although one sister was designated to ...

Philadelphia Inquirer 3/23/2002