Truro is where Cornwall goes to work, and its houses are under a very specific pressure: not holiday lets, not second homes, but families and professionals who need one more room - a bedroom for the third child, an office for the hybrid job, a place for a parent near Treliske. The city's answer has been sitting overhead all along. Truro's roofs, from Georgian townhouses to 1970s semis, hold more buildable space than any equivalent area in the county.
We convert lofts and garages across the city and its villages, handling the part Truro makes uniquely interesting: the planning. Conservation area, listed buildings, and Cornwall Council's own planners a mile up the road - we design schemes that pass, and we put the survey, structural engineering, building control and fit-out under one roof and one written quote, VAT included.
Tell us what you are thinking and we will come and look at it. No charge, and no obligation to go ahead.
Half an hour, no charge, and a straight answer on whether the space works.
Steels, floors and bearings are our own work, not a subcontractor's problem.
Full Plans submitted to Cornwall Council, completion certificate at the end.
Same people from first survey to final walk-round. Nobody to chase.
Truro's centre is a set piece. Lemon Street climbs south from the river in near-unbroken Georgian order - begun in 1798, finished by 1831, and cited ever since as the finest such street west of Bath - while the three spires of the cathedral, finished in 1910, stand over the lot. A conservation area wraps this core, and a dense scatter of listed buildings sits inside it. Converting here is careful, satisfying work in some of Cornwall's best houses.
Then the city changes character completely. Truro's real growth came in the 1960s to 1980s, when estates spread over the hills - Trelander and Hendra east of the river, Malabar and Kenwyn above the centre, Gloweth and Highertown running out toward the hospital. This is where most Truro conversions happen: unlisted houses, willing roofs, attached garages, no conservation officer required. With 3,550 more homes coming at Langarth over the next two decades, the city's future is still being built - but the family space its existing streets need is being built by us, one roof at a time.
Truro asks for offices as often as bedrooms - a pattern no other town in our patch repeats. All three services below answer it.
From listed Georgian roofs that need a conservation officer's blessing to 1970s trusses at Gloweth that need nothing but engineering, Truro lofts span the whole difficulty scale. We tell you where yours sits on it - and what that means for cost and timetable - at the first visit.
Learn more about loft conversions in Cornwall
Truro's suburbs were built in the era of the attached garage, and the city's professional workforce has turned 'spare room' into 'office' faster than anywhere else we cover. A converted garage is the warmest, quietest workspace a commute of eight stairs can buy.
Learn more about garage conversions in Cornwall
Proximity to Treliske makes Truro the obvious town for older relatives to live close to family - and an annexe does it without a second mortgage. We handle the structure and the paperwork, and brief you on council tax banding before you commit.
Learn more about annexes & granny flats in CornwallThe case for converting is never generic - it is made of what a particular town's houses, jobs and prices are doing. Here is Truro's version.
The hospital, the county council, the courts and the cathedral make Truro Cornwall's employment centre, and its housing demand is steadier and less seasonal than the coast's. Space added to a Truro house serves commuters and families year-round - and is valued accordingly.
No town in our patch asks for offices like Truro does. Hybrid working plus professional jobs equals a queue of people trying to work from a kitchen table. A loft or garage conversion gives the job its own door - which is the difference between working from home and living at work.
The 60s-to-80s estates that ring the city were built with accessible roof structures and generous garages, before plot sizes shrank. They are the most conversion-friendly stock Truro has, and there are thousands of them within a mile of the centre.
The conservation area and the listed terraces are not obstacles so much as instructions. We design rooflight schemes that pass, keep street-facing roofs untouched, and put the drama on the rear slope where the planners cannot see it.
With detached averages around £488,000 against a city average of £323,000, moving up in Truro costs six figures. Adding the bedroom instead costs a fraction of the gap - and Langarth's 3,550 planned homes will feed the entry market, not the family-house shortage.
The same disciplined order as every job we run, with stage three doing extra duty in this city - because in Truro, checking the planning position before drawing anything is the difference between a six-week start and a six-month one.
We measure the head height from the top of the ceiling joist to the underside of the ridge, look at how the roof is built, and work out where a staircase can physically land. On a garage we check the floor level, the damp course and how the walls were built. This is the visit that decides whether the job is worth doing at all, and we would rather tell you no at this stage than three weeks in.
One document, VAT included, with the structural allowance shown as its own line rather than buried. Where a wall has to be opened up before anyone can be certain what the steel is bearing onto, we say so and give you the range. Exclusions are listed. If your quote from someone else has no structural line on it, that cost has not gone away.
We check whether your permitted development rights survive. Dormers are not permitted development on article 2(3) land, which in Cornwall means every conservation area, the National Landscape and all ten areas of the Mining World Heritage Site. Rooflights usually still are. Getting this right at the start is the difference between a four-week start and a four-month one.
Architectural drawings, then a structural engineer sizes the beams and specifies the bearings. We submit Full Plans to Cornwall Council rather than a Building Notice - it costs less in every fee band and it means the details are agreed before anyone cuts anything, instead of being argued about on site.
Scaffold where the work needs it, then the load-bearing stage: new floor joists sized for a habitable floor rather than a storage loft, steels in, padstones and spreaders bedded properly. On older Cornish stone walls this is where surprises live, which is why it happens early and why we look before we price.
Roof made good, dormer or rooflights in, windows glazed. Once the space is dry it is insulation, electrics, plumbing and the stair. Insulation is worth paying attention to here - the limits for a conversion are tighter than for a new-build house, 0.15 on the roof against 0.16, which catches a lot of people out.
Skim, decorate, doors, sockets, flooring. Then the building control final inspection and your completion certificate, the electrical certificate, and the written structural warranty. We walk the room with you before we take the scaffold down, not after.
Truro is the only town we serve where 'home office' beats 'extra bedroom' as the reason people first ring us - the desk has overtaken the bed.
A conversion in a Georgian terrace will still be standing when the mortgage is a memory - if the structure under it was done right. The same ten-year written warranty covers every Truro job we hand over, from Lemon Street to Langarth.
The warranty covers the part we control: the structure. Beams sized and signed off by an engineer, bearings that are capable of taking the load, floors that meet their span, and a roof that stays weathertight where we have opened it up. It is written down and handed over with the building control completion certificate at the end of the job, not promised verbally on the doorstep at the start of it.
It matters more here than it would upcountry. A lot of Cornish walls are random rubble stone rather than cavity brickwork, and Eurocode 6, the masonry design standard, explicitly does not cover rubble masonry. There is no code route for dropping a steel onto a wall like that. It has to be justified by an engineer from first principles, which is exactly why we open up and look before we price, rather than after.
Cornwall's capital in three stops - stone, art and a night out.
Finished in 1910 and the first Anglican cathedral raised on a new English site since Salisbury in the 1220s, its three Gothic Revival spires define the city from every approach. Free to enter, and the vaulted nave repays the neck-ache.
Learn more about Truro Cathedral (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
The county's principal museum on River Street - Cornish history from prehistory to the mining age, fine art, and a programme of changing exhibitions. The former Royal Cornwall Museum, renamed but still the keeper of the county's story.
Learn more about Cornwall Museum & Art Gallery (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
Cornwall's biggest theatre, rebuilt and reopened on Lemon Quay - touring West End productions, live music and comedy, with the farmers market filling the square outside twice a week. The county's night out, two streets from the cathedral.
Learn more about Hall for Cornwall (opens Google Maps in a new tab)Conversions across mid and north Cornwall, from Victorian terraces in Truro to bungalows on the coast road.
We had been told twice that our roof pitch was too shallow for a loft. The survey here came back the same, but with an actual option - a rear dormer to buy back the headroom over the stair. They measured 1.9m at the centre of the flight and showed us where that sat against the regs before we spent anything. Two bedrooms and a shower room now.
Ours is an old miner's terrace and the walls are random rubble, not cavity. They were straight with us that the steel bearings would need opening up before anyone could price it properly, and they got the engineer out first rather than guessing. Cost more than a modern semi would have, but nothing on the quote changed from start to finish.
We're inside the mining World Heritage Site so a dormer was never going to fly. They knew that on the first visit and steered us to conservation rooflights instead, which kept us out of a planning application altogether. The slate was matched properly too - you cannot tell where the new work stops.
Integral garage into a snug and a utility. What sold me was that they explained the floor build-up - the damp membrane, the insulation, why the finished floor ends up a couple of inches higher than the hall. Every other quote just said 'convert garage'. Warm room, no condensation, and it was done in under four weeks.
Terraced house on a hill, so the scaffold had to go on the pavement. They sorted the licence with Cornwall Council and gave us the two-week lead time up front instead of turning up and discovering it. Small thing but it tells you how the rest of the job went.
A proper annexe for my mum, and honest advice on the bits I would never have thought about - that the council tax discount depends on who lives there, and that a planning condition tying it to the main house would knock out the reduced VAT rate. They flagged it before we committed rather than after.
Suburban Truro prices like the rest of our patch: garages £15,000 to £20,000, rooflight lofts £30,000 to £45,000, dormers and hip to gable £45,000 to £85,000, before VAT. Conservation-area and listed work carries design and consent costs the suburbs never see, and we set those out as their own lines so you can weigh them. The site visit and the written quote cost nothing either side of the boundary.
Truro marks the southern reach of our working area - just inside the 25 mile circle we keep around Wadebridge. Every town here is covered by the same crew and the same written promise.
Bedroom, study or annexe - the free site visit tells you what your roof or garage can become, how the conservation map treats your street, and the fixed figure it would take. Cornwall's city deserves better than a kitchen-table office.
