Does this look good on Marsamxett? Boutique hotel challenges vistas

A dilapidated building opposite Valletta’s Peacock Gardens, overlooking the Marsamxett harbour, is being earmarked for demolition to be replaced by a 29-room “5-star superior boutique hotel”.

But it’s the contemporary design proposed for this hotel – characterised by long and narrow glass apertures – that will get people talking.

Apart from the extensive excavations in what is an archaeologically sensitive city, this particular area in Valletta had previously been earmarked for another bold design back in 2010. But that planning request, filed by none other than the Valletta local council, was withdrawn following a storm of controversy on the hotel’s presumed impact on the adjacent ‘Mattia Preti’ house – said to have once been home to the 17th century Italian Baroque artist.

The new proposed development will include three basement levels, and five storeys that will house a café, wine bar, conference area, a restaurant and a spa. Proponents GP Borg are one of the island’s main suppliers of ready-mixed concrete and concrete blocks. The group declared fully owning the site in the application.

Mariello Spiteri, a planning consultant who previously served on a PA decision-making board, is the architect of the project.

The plan includes restoring the Preti palazzo.

In 2016, the Planning Authority refused a permit for a five-storey terraced house on the site, after strong objections by the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage, which shot down the “aesthetically unacceptable and incompatible” design for the World Heritage Site’s streetscape. Moreover, the increase in height would have created “a high and unsightly blank wall” directly over an adjacent scheduled property.

But following an appeal to the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal, a permit was issued in 2020 for the construction of a terraced house of three floors and a receded floor.

In the new hotel application, the five-storey build will be as high as that first proposed in 2016, with the difference that additional storeys in a contemporary design are also being proposed on the  adjacent older building.

The building is flanked on one part by a five-storey building, and on another side by a three-storey building, and immediately surrounded by buildings of architectural value, most featuring traditional Maltese balconies – a prominent part of the Valletta landscape on this side of the city.

These buildings and the bastions of Valletta date to the period of the Knights of the Order of St John as well as the British period.