IN Brief:
- RED South West is delivering more than £42m of commercial refurbishment work across Bristol and Bath.
- The £34m Portwall Place project covers around 150,000 sq ft and targets EPC A, BREEAM Excellent, and NABERS 4.5.
- Pinesgate West is an £8m refurbishment that will become Buro Happold’s Bath headquarters.
RED Construction Group is delivering more than £42m of office refurbishment across Bristol and Bath, with its South West division working on two commercial schemes combining extensive retained-building work with demanding energy and environmental performance targets.
The larger contract is the £34m redevelopment of Portwall Place in Bristol, where RED is working for BlackRock alongside development manager LS Estates. The seven-storey project will provide up to 150,000 sq ft of Cat A office space when work completes at the end of 2027.
The existing building is being comprehensively refurbished rather than replaced. Floorplates, reception areas, vertical circulation, mechanical and electrical systems, the façade, roof, and tenant amenities all form part of the programme, requiring the contractor to coordinate new building performance requirements around a substantial retained structure.
Portwall Place will include a café, gym, communal workspace, cycle and shower facilities, and more than 7,500 sq ft of external terraces. The roof works include a major terrace and green-roof areas, adding usable amenity and ecology measures without moving the project towards the embodied-carbon cost of wholesale demolition and replacement.
The completed building is targeting EPC A, BREEAM Excellent, and NABERS 4.5. It is also being designed as an all-electric workplace, while RED reports a calculated 75% embodied-carbon saving associated with the redevelopment strategy.
That figure is significant because commercial retrofit now has to address two different carbon problems. Operational performance determines how much energy a building consumes after occupation, while embodied carbon reflects the impact of the structure, materials, replacement works, and construction activity required to create it.
Retaining an existing frame can reduce that second burden, but it transfers complexity into investigation and coordination. Existing structures rarely correspond perfectly with modern services routes, façade requirements, fire strategies, floor loading, airtightness expectations, or contemporary office layouts, and each retained element has to be understood before the design around it can be fixed.
Portwall Place therefore relies on more than installing efficient equipment into an older shell. Façade repairs and enhancements, structural and roof interventions, upgraded HVAC and electrical systems, and changes to circulation have to work together if the completed building is to achieve its targeted ratings in operation rather than simply meet a specification on paper.
The second contract is Pinesgate West in Bath, an £8m refurbishment that will create a new headquarters for engineering consultancy Buro Happold. RED South West is working for WPV Developments to an AWW Architects design.
The Bath scheme places greater emphasis on the external envelope. The existing façade will be removed and replaced, with the new design intended to reduce solar gain and cut operational energy demand while changing the appearance of the building at a prominent approach into the city.
Photovoltaic panels form part of that strategy, alongside EV charging, cycle storage, and external terrace space. The project is also targeting BREEAM Excellent and EPC A, putting façade performance, services, renewable generation, and occupier facilities into the same refurbishment package.
The two developments illustrate different versions of the same commercial problem. Older office stock has to compete with newer buildings for occupiers while investors and tenants increasingly expect stronger energy performance, better amenities, and credible environmental data. Cosmetic refurbishment alone does little to resolve those requirements.
For contractors, the shift increases the proportion of work concentrated in technically awkward areas. Envelope replacement, services upgrades, structural alteration, occupied-site interfaces, retained fabric, roof interventions, and commissioning can create more coordination risk than a straightforward new-build frame where most systems begin from a known condition.
The existing building also dictates what can sensibly be retained. Every element removed adds waste, replacement material, labour, and embodied carbon, but keeping poorly performing components can undermine the eventual operational targets. The project team therefore has to distinguish between retention that creates genuine value and retention that simply leaves a future defect or performance problem in place.
RED South West and AWW have worked together previously on Hollis Wharf in Bath and a health hub in Weston-super-Mare, giving the current Pinesgate programme an established design-and-construction relationship. Portwall Place, meanwhile, is significantly larger and will become one of the division’s principal commercial refurbishment projects through to 2027.
Both schemes are being delivered into a regional office market where the quality gap between modern and ageing stock is becoming increasingly visible. Higher energy prices, occupier expectations, and sustainability reporting have made building performance a commercial issue rather than an optional enhancement added late in design.
The construction test will come at handover and early occupation. Portwall Place and Pinesgate West are being marketed around measurable performance as well as appearance, leaving the quality of façade work, services installation, controls, commissioning, and retained-building interfaces to determine whether the finished assets achieve the standards used to justify their refurbishment.
