Kitchen Makeover for Shire Hall

Adding to the renovation of the main hall in the historic former Winchelsea Shire Hall building, Winchelsea Community House has upgraded the kitchen with a completely new central bench, a commercial dishwasher, and a commercial coffee machine.

This is a significant remodelling that greatly improves the potential uses for the space. Think community events involving food such as celebration occasions, pop-up foodie events such as pizza night or wine-tastings, publicity launches including snacks, and maybe even a coffee and cake service for casual public visitors and drop-ins. The facilities also allow hospitality courses to be run, offering real-world experience alongside hands-on learning. Your ideas on how the kitchen can be both used for community benefit and help with Winch House operating costs are very welcome.

The kitchen makeover was possible thanks to a combination of 3 grants for various components and aspects;

Winch House Committee and staff are very grateful for these financial contributions without which the Shire Hall kitchen makeover would not have been possible – the new kitchen helps reactivate this important community space in the heart of Winchelsea. The project was undertaken by local builder Mitch Tudball of MGT Building & Construction, liaising with various subcontractors and Surf Coast Shire to handle the demolition, clear-up, rewiring, plumbing, cabinetry and all the other tasks. Our thanks to Mitch for taking good care of the project and getting it all done with minimal disturbance to the normal activities at Winch House.

The dishwasher now makes cleaning up after an event with catering a matter of minutes – stack the dirty dishes, pass into the dishwasher for a minute and a half, push out the other side to dry – done! The commercial coffee machine includes all the equipment and startup supplies to allow Winch House to sell barista coffee, hot chocolate, and leaf tea. Along with other places in Winchelsea offering good coffee, we hope in time this will be another good reason for increasing numbers of people to either visit or stop in Winchelsea in the coming years.

You may already have seen that once a month, there’s a Kitchen Conversations event – gathering around the central bench, discussing… whatever needs discussing. As mentioned above, the kitchen makes all sorts of activities, events and courses newly much easier and more convenient. Keep a look out for more of this sort of thing coming.

At the start of 2021, Surf Coast Shire redecorated the main hall including removing a raised floor, replacing the carpet, painting the walls, electrical wiring repairs, and a wifi internet access point. The Shire Hall was then handed over to Winch House to operate (independently of Surf Coast Shire) with a 3-year financial package that allowed the recruitment of someone to manage, organise and promote the Hall as an extension of Winch House.

There’s now 18 months to go for Winch House to establish financial sustainability for the Shire Hall space. Your thoughts and ideas on how this can be achieved are very much sought. Do you have a particular cuisine eg. South American you’d like to teach? A particular skill eg. making preserves & jams that you’d like to run a course for? Get in touch with Wendy and let’s see if we can make it happen. Mon-Fri 9am-2pm, [email protected], or 03 5267 2028.