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Best Wishes from Focus Retreat Center

Pete Lyons
January 15, 2025

We wish all FRC guests, fans, and supporters the best in your creative endeavors in 2025 and onward. We wanted to share one final update with you. Focus Retreat Center is now officially closed. Pete & Stella have moved back to Colorado to be closer to family. The FRC property in Malone is under new management.

It was truly our privilege to host you at FRC. We hope your retreat experience was restorative and inspiring. We hope you stay connected with friends you made and continue to find more opportunities for sabbatical and community throughout your lives.

Creating and running Focus Retreat Center was a major undertaking for us, and we could not have done it without support, encouragement, and help from our family, friends, and guests. It started with those few curious and brave souls on the Recurse Center mailing list who agreed to join our “Retreat Zero” test run and spend 3 weeks in a rental house in the woods sharing tight quarters with strangers based on nothing more than a 1-paragraph email. As we struggled to actually purchase the property in Malone, which was a long and difficult transaction, our friends and family helped us through it every step of the way. Once that was done - congratulations - we now own a very old building and no one knows whether it is on the brink of collapse or just needs new light bulbs.

The next 9 months we spent renovating the property required help from community organizations, Mayor Andrea Dumas, our next door neighbors from the Notre-Dame Church, local community members, new local friends, every hardware store and home center in a 100-mile radius, and some friends willing to travel and help us fix the place up. We were a long way from home, in a very different climate, and a very different region.

We especially want to thank our guests for taking a risk and a leap of faith by booking a retreat at FRC. Thank you for your spirit of adventure and courage to try something unusual. We tried our absolute best to provide a great experience for you.

Please continue to stay in touch. We really do think about all of our guests regularly and enjoy hearing what you are up to.

Love and pancakes,

Pete & Stella

Very Special Thanks