A former department store reborn as the front door to Swansea’s public services has been named Wales’ Project of the Year — headlining an awards night where three of the four Welsh winners came from Swansea, Llanelli and Porthcawl.
Y Storfa took the top honour at the RICS Awards Wales ceremony, held at the Parkgate Hotel in Cardiff on Wednesday, as well as winning the public sector project category outright.
The community hub was created through the refurbishment of the former BHS building in Swansea city centre, delivered as part of the council’s £1bn regeneration programme.
It brings the city’s public services together under one roof — the central library, archives, employment support, learning spaces and community facilities — and has quickly become one of the busiest buildings in the city centre.
The awards, run by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, recognise the most impressive recent projects in land, property, construction and infrastructure — and this year’s Welsh winners had a distinctly local flavour.
Canolfan Pentre Awel in Llanelli won the community benefit category — recognition for the 20,000 square metre health and wellbeing campus that opened last year as the first phase of the Swansea Bay City Deal-funded Pentre Awel development.
Led by Carmarthenshire County Council in partnership with Hywel Dda University Health Board, Cardiff University, Swansea University, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Coleg Sir Gâr, the Canolfan combines leisure facilities with community health services, business space and education — designed to help people lead active, healthier lives for longer.
The heritage award went to Sker House, the Grade I listed Elizabethan manor that rises from the dunes outside Porthcawl, gazing out over the coastline.
Ruinous and almost lost, the house was rescued by a building preservation trust and restored in 1999 — with its collapsed ruin finally rebuilt in 2024, completing a restoration spanning more than thirty years. The awards described it as now one of the finest Elizabethan houses in Wales.
The house carries a fame of its own beyond its architecture: it is the setting of the Maid of Sker legend, which gave R.D. Blackmore’s Victorian novel its name.
The fourth Welsh winner was Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, which took the refurbishment category for a redevelopment delivered inside a live hospital — an approach the judges heard cuts embodied carbon by around 40% compared with building new. Caerphilly Castle’s regeneration project was highly commended in the heritage category.
All the Welsh winners now go forward to represent Wales at the RICS UK Grand Final on Thursday 22 October.
Kerry Gibbs, the RICS UK national awards chair, said the awards shone a spotlight on “the most inspiring people, projects and innovations shaping the built and natural environment”, with more than 300 entries received across the twelve UK regions this year.
She said the awards helped demonstrate “the positive impact that surveyors, as well as buildings, have on individuals and communities”.
For Swansea, the national nod caps a run of milestones for the city centre’s transformation — and with the Civic Centre’s proposed seafront successor now out to public consultation, the next chapter is already being written.
