There’s a good chance you’ve experienced Les Church’s handiwork if you live in Grant County.

Church, the owner of Double C Construction, is a prolific local building contractor, stonemason and musician who happens to live in one of the most historic buildings in the county.

His 1865 Prairie City home, a three-story building on Washington Street, was built by a fellow stonemason who died in 1888. The walls of the first floor are made of hand-cut stone blocks, with brick and wood filling out the rest of the home. In its early history, the Flageolette house was a general store, a hotel, a tavern and a stagecoach stop.

“This house was built by a French immigrant named Frank Flageolette,” Church said. “He was an innkeeper. He sold goods to the miners. The house was like a general store, a stage stop, a hotel, a bar and, in the later years after Frank Flagiolette moved on, the place was called Harley’s Hotel and was advertised as such in the early 1900s.”

Church purchased the home in 1995 and had previously remodeled the former kitchen area on the bottom floor for a previous owner. The interior of the home gives one the sense of frontier life, much like a visit to Kam Wah Chung in John Day thrusts a visitor directly into the history of Grant County.

“All of those things cross your mind from time to time,” Church said. “You do think about it, that it’s actually history. It used to be a hotel. Sometimes you can imagine people sitting around sparsely fitted rooms. There were no closets.”

A master bedroom on the bottom floor consists of Flageolette’s stonework from nearly 160 years ago, with a large, functioning fireplace and decorative tilework that Church set into the historic blocks. The first-floor foyer features a large iron woodstove to keep the home nice and warm.

A set of stairs leads to a living room with Church’s guitar collection, which features an Epiphone guitar in the style of the mustard-yellow Gibson Les Paul played by Slash of Guns N’ Roses. There’s also Church’s favorite guitar — a red Kramer Striker like the one made famous by Eddie Van Halen. Church owns 16 guitars.

“Music is the language that transcends all the barriers between everybody’s differences,” he said. “Music is the language of the world, and I love music. I love guitars, and I have lots of guitars.”

From the second floor, another set of stairs leads to the attic, with bedrooms that still have the original floorboards from 1865.

Born in Eugene in 1960, Church played in rock bands for most of his life, playing rhythm guitar and serving as lead singer and frontman for bands such as Fallout in Eugene, Midrange in Bend, and The Brink when he lived in Mesa, Arizona, for two years in the late 1980s.

These days Church can be found playing with his current band, Redheaded Stepchild, in gigs across Grant County and Eastern Oregon.

“Music is a big part of my life,” he said. “It’s not what drives me, but it’s always been a huge ingredient in my life. It always has been.”

Thirty-four years ago Church moved to Prairie City, where he’s been a successful remodeler and building contractor.

“The work that I do as a local remodeling and building contractor is that all of my customers become my friends and most of my customers are past customers,” he said.

Church’s remodeling work includes many of the roofs and storefronts in downtown Prairie, the Masonic Lodge, John Day water pump stations and the John Day Elks Lodge and other jobs for hundreds of customers throughout Grant County.

He’s worked on his own home for three decades now and it’s still a work in progress, with painted wooden trim on the exterior just completed this past week. The front yard features 150-year-old lilac trees, cherry plum and greengage plum trees.

“I can’t imagine living in any other house,” Church said. “Sometimes I feel like this house owns me. It’s utterly home. I really can’t imagine living elsewhere.”

Les Church

AGE: 63

RESIDENCE: Prairie City

OCCUPATION: Remodeler, building contractor and rock guitarist