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Offa House: Diocesan Retreat House

Offa House is a Grade-II Listed Georgian Rectory, standing next to the ancient parish church of St Gregory in the village of Offchurch, just three miles outside Leamington Spa. It stands in two acres of garden with views across the Warwickshire countryside. Until 1961 the house was the vicarage of the village of Offchurch. The House however now functions as the Coventry Church of England Diocesan Retreat House and Conference Centre providing a venue for residential and day retreats, conferences and meetings. Offa House current runs as a self-financing operation and has significant bookings currently and into the next year. It is a financially stable operation.

The House currently has significant recent extensions at the rear, providing additional accommodation and meeting rooms. The Trustees and Warden of Offa house believe some of the meeting rooms and the current small, non disabled-accessible and non-en-suite accommodation wing within these extensions requires replacing. Plans were drawn up by an Architect in 2007 but the management group now feel that these are unsatisfactory.

Wyatt MacLaren was asked to provide a Scoping Study of Development Options for Offa House and has carried out an appraisal of the Planning policy, an assessment of the site, and produced five distinct options for development in line with the client brief.

Wyatt Maclaren sought to produce a strongly-differentiated set of plausible options to allow Offa House to consider the differential impact of the following factors in each case. These ranged from:

  • Acceptability to Offa House in terms of its self image or 'brand'.
  • Acceptability to the planning authourity, who are likely to prefer the schemes with the least visual impact
  • Acceptability to funders / benefactors who may well prefer the scheme with the greatest visual impact

We also considered within the options the possibility of Phased construction to minimise operational limitions on Offa House, Likely construction cost, Likely material quality, Sustainability, and Impact on the utility of the existing listed building.