An award winning 'bottle bank'

Situated roughly between Swansea and Cardiff, Porthcawl grew up as a 19th-century coal port, before becoming a resort town for miners from the surrounding valleys on their fortnight holidays. Today, the town is arranged roughly along class lines. There is a funfair and family caravan parks to the east, and a more well-to-do, largely elderly community centred around the golf club to the west. Esplanade House is slap bang in the middle.

The civic trust point out that Porthcawl's seafront is a designated conservation area - partly as a result of its own campaigning. The site of Esplanade House was previously occupied by the Esplanade Hotel, which dated back to the late 1880s. It was just about the grandest building in town - a four-storey edifice presenting a row of steeply pitched gables to the seafront. But it closed nearly a decade ago, and the building fell into disrepair. It was not listed, but was part of local history, says Hontoir. "There was a very strong feeling that if something had to be built on that site, could it not have been by preserving the frontage and building behind it, as has happened elsewhere? Or if that were not possible, could there not have been some effort made to preserve the essential elements of the frontage, perhaps by building something similar?"

But the old building was "unsalvageable", according to the architects. "The planners basically said, 'Look, we want you to push the boat out on this,'" says Davies. "We thought about what would really lift Porthcawl. Should we do a creamy-coloured render building with a slate roof, or do we actually put something there that stands as a marker for Porthcawl and elevates it to another generation, basically?"

The judges at the RSAW sided with the architects. "There are people who tend to view Porthcawl itself through heavily rose-tinted spectacles - as an Edwardian seaside resort, which it quite frankly never really was," says Jonathan Adams, president of the RSAW and assessor of the Welsh Housing Design awards. "To me, even the best buildings on Porthcawl seafront are really nothing to write home about. On the other hand, the place is in desperate straits. Looking at it from the outside, it would absolutely be the right thing to do to carry out a development that completely rejuvenated a key part of the seafront. The new building is attention-grabbing. In certain situations, that is exactly what you need."

Adams is concerned, though, about the disparity between what architects and lay people consider to be good design, especially when it comes to awards. He is best-known as designer of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre, which won several awards; but he agrees that architects can sometimes design for the benefit of each other, rather than ordinary citizens. "Again and again, you'll see buildings lauded and applauded that most ordinary people see nothing in," he says. He cites the example of Caruso St John's Brick House in London, which was shortlisted for the Stirling prize last year. "Architects love that kind of thing. Things like the detailing of the brickwork, the way the concrete roof sits on top of the bricks, the shape of the roof. To most, dare I say it, ordinary people, it would just leave them cold; they wouldn't begin to understand what was good about it."

Public scorn is usually reserved for more severe and austere buildings, hard-edged modernist creations, for example, that might reference Mies van der Rohe, but do little for the local high street. The notion of the high-minded, uncompromising architects who take it upon their shoulders to single-handedly improve society - as propagated in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead - is still pervasive in the popular consciousness, if nowhere else. Esplanade House, by contrast, makes an appeal to the masses. It attempts to speak the language of the people, and still the people aren't hearing it. Does the public need to learn more about architecture? Or do architects need to learn more about the public? Or does everyone just need to talk to each other a bit more?

Even in its awards write-up, the RSAW says: "This is the kind of building some will profess to dislike, but which the majority of locals and regular visitors will come to cherish." Esplanade House's luxury apartments sold out in three hours. Hontoir, meanwhile, says he is so incensed he is building a model of the old Esplanade Hotel for the local museum. Adams, though, has no regrets. "It deserves an award for the risks that were taken. We need to be encouraging people to take those opportunities to be bold. If we don't, we're never going to get anything special".