Our plans for the future

Epiphany House is a busy conference and retreat centre in the heart of Truro. Our excellent hospitality, characterful meeting rooms, spacious grounds and beautiful Grade 2 listed building keep people coming back but we want to improve on what we can offer to our guests. Over the last five years the demand for our facilities has increased by about 150% and we are now outgrowing our current facilities. We need more residential facilities and flexible meeting spaces for groups, conferences and counsellors to enable us to meet this pressing need.

An increasing number of our potential overnight guests expect ensuite bathroom facilities and we have none of these at present. We are relatively small as retreat houses go, with just 12 bedrooms, and to put ensuite facilities into the existing rooms would mean reducing the number of bedrooms further. We already have to turn some group bookings away because we don’t have quite enough bedrooms.

We would like to be able to restore those rooms that were sub-divided as ‘cells’ by the convent of nuns who formerly owned the building. Restoration of the rooms to their former dimensions would reduce still further the number of bedrooms to too few to be viable.

We hope to carry out our plans to secure the future of the House through a phased development:

  • Convert what is now the yard area, garages and workshops into 7 ensuite bedrooms (they will be 1st floor from the inside but ground floor from the outside because of the way the ground rises)
  • Provide some universal access facilities
  • Restore some of the existing rooms to their former size which would have the benefit of enabling us to put in some ensuites and create another library / meeting room
  • Re-instate the second floor

We hope that the renewed facilities will enable us to better fulfil our charitable purposes of retreat, education and training, and providing community facilities, which will in turn secure the future viability of the House. The whole project will depend on funding, and will inevitably happen in separate phases.

UPDATE, October 2018: We are delighted that our planning application has been successful with just a few conditions.

UPDATE, February 2021: Phase 1 is now complete and we have seven ensuite bedrooms in our new wing plus an accessible ensuite bedroom with universal access facilities