2025 Regional NSW Architecture Award Winners Announced

Regional NSW’s best new residential, commercial, and public buildings have been named in the Australian Institute of Architects 2025 NSW Regional Architecture Awards. This year’s winners can be seen as a window into the changing built environment of contemporary regional Australia and a look into the way the state will live, work, and play, now and into the future. In particular, the 2025 winning cohort showed a pathway forward for sustainable and heritage buildings, including insightful adaptive reuses and considered renovations and additions. They have also shone a spotlight on design that has a deep connection to context and an intrinsic consideration of culture and Country. 

The 21 winners and commendations were chosen by a jury of industry experts from a shortlist of regional New South Wales’s leading architectural projects. Some of the winning projects in 2025 contain common themes that unite them. 

Jury Chair Jarad Grice, Associate at Sam Crawford Architects, comments that, “It was a privilege for Carly, Eddie, and I to serve as Jurors for the Regional Division awards this year. With more entries than ever before, we were presented with the un-enviable task of whittling down a shortlist, for which, we were rewarded with the opportunity to experience 16 admirable works of regional architecture.”

The 2025 NSW Regional Architecture Awards program attracted 36 entrants. A comprehensive judging process determined the shortlisted entries and eventual winners. The jury, comprised of Jarad Grice, Carly Martin, and Eddie Page, embarked on a five-day jury tour right across regional NSW, going as far north as Brunswick Heads and as far south as Rosedale.

The various juries this year undertook one of the biggest regional tours they have ever conducted, with 20% of the shortlisted projects entered in the awards receiving a site visit in the regional areas. 

 “This is only the second year that the jury has visited shortlisted regional projects in person. We can confirm the great value of this process. Seeing projects firsthand greatly enhanced our understanding of them, and the awards given are a testament to the rigor and quality of the Institutes’ NSW Regional Awards program,” states Grice.

“Humble or luxuriant, public, or private it was a pleasure to observe through all the buildings we visited, a common desire not only to enhance the lives of clients but to contribute in a meaningful and considered fashion to the fabric of their setting and the wider community.”

Grice further comments that, “It is now a common refrain that we continue to live in a period of great change. With somewhat of an exodus from our cities, the role of Architects living and working in the regions has possibly never been more important. It is vital that the mistakes made in our larger cities over the years are not repeated as our regional towns and centres grow, and part of the responsibility for this, rests with us as architects.”   

“Regional architects have the incredible opportunity of being more intimately connected to the richness of the Australian landscape than those of us working in dense urban environments. As we continue to develop an Australian architecture, the greatest work will recognise the responsibility we have to country and to the knowledge and history of the indigenous inhabitants of the land that was stolen, on which we live and with which our stories are now entwined.”

 “We must build a shared future of sustainability and unity. The Jury looks forward with great anticipation to the ongoing, growing influence and contribution of regional architecture within the wider body of the profession.”