Team

Lead Perit/i: Chris Briffa Architects

Architectural Design: Chris Briffa Architects

Planning Consulting: Chris Briffa Architects

Structural Engineering: Cuschieri Architects

Art Restoration & Conservation: Prevarti

Interior Design: Chris Briffa Architects

Building Systems Engineering: Camilleri & Cuschieri

Project Management: James Spiteri Tanti

Teatru Salesjan’s refurbishment project (completed in 2024) strived to achieve a balance preserving historical integrity while meeting contemporary demands, making it a candidate for the Adaptive Renovation Award.

By carefully respecting the building’s original architecture – restoring significant features such as the ornate detailing, the Giuseppe Calí fresco, stage layout, and distinctive spatial configuration – the project highlights the theatre’s storied legacy.

At the same time, it thoughtfully integrates modern interventions to ensure continued relevance and functionality, including enhanced lighting, improved acoustics, HVAC, and upgraded safety measures: each installed with the intention of being totally reversible.

This sensitive blend of old and new not only safeguards the cultural and historical character of Teatru Salesjan but also revitalises it as a vibrant community hub for the performing arts. The meticulous approach to restoration and adaptive reuse – emphasizing authenticity, sustainability, and durability – demonstrates that historic buildings can evolve with the times while retaining their heritage value.

Images © Chris Briffa Architect, Hanna Briffa

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Team

Lead Perit/i: PERITI STUDIO

Architectural Design: PERITI STUDIO

Planning Consulting: PERITI STUDIO

Geotechnical Engineering: PERITI STUDIO

Structural Engineering: PERITI STUDIO

Conservation: PERITI STUDIO

Interior Design: Claire Galea

Building Systems Engineering: PERITI STUDIO

Project Management: PERITI STUDIO

This 18th-century vernacular farmhouse in Naxxar’s historic core had been abandoned for over 50 years.

Once a working farm and family dwelling, it had fallen into serious disrepair. Organised around a central courtyard and divided into three wings, the property retained significant heritage features—stone slab ceilings, timber beams, xulliel walls, arches, and a large mill room—but its fragmentation and poor condition made it unsuitable for modern family life.

The challenge was clear: conserve the historic fabric while transforming the house into a practical, flowing, and welcoming home.

The vision was to unify the separate wings into one cohesive residence while preserving the spirit of the original architecture. Conservation best practices guided every step: restoring walls and beams, retaining important spaces, and introducing new interventions that are legible and reversible. Modern structural, mechanical, and environmental systems were carefully integrated without compromising authenticity. Skylights were added to bring natural light deep into the interiors, complementing the property’s southward orientation, which maximises winter solar gains. The result is a home that honours its past while offering clear circulation, outdoor connections, and contemporary comfort.

The defining intervention is a sculptural concrete staircase. More than a connector between floors, it links the two upper wings and serves as a bold architectural statement and frees previously used space in the courtyard. Its contemporary form deliberately contrasts with the traditional shell, highlighting the dialogue between past and present. Attention to detail was crucial where historic and new elements meet. Local stone, restored timber, and original masonry sit comfortably alongside plastered concrete, glass and clean finishes.

At the finishes stage, natural materials were chosen to reinforce warmth, tactility, and a grounded, homey feel. Sustainability was embedded discreetly through double-glazed apertures, insulated ceilings, and thermally efficient walls.

The re-imagined courtyard functions as a daily threshold, integrating outdoor space into everyday family routines. The staircase, encountered repeatedly throughout the day, becomes both a sculptural anchor and a lived experience. The family now enjoys a home that feels traditional yet practical, historic yet comfortable. Beyond the client, the project contributes to the wider conversation on conservation in Malta, demonstrating how vernacular properties can be revitalised for modern life while preserving their cultural significance. Energy-efficient upgrades improve comfort and reduce environmental impact, offering a model for sustainable adaptive reuse.

What makes this project extraordinary is the balance it achieves: rigorous conservation paired with inventive design. It safeguards a farmhouse long left dormant while transforming it into a home that flows, breathes, and connects to daily life. Its sensitivity, crafted detailing, and bold architectural gestures make it unique.

This farmhouse demonstrates how Malta’s architectural heritage can be conserved while being reshaped for contemporary domestic living. By merging careful restoration with spatial invention and thoughtful design, it sets a benchmark for adaptive reuse and reaffirms the role of architecture in shaping lived experience. It is a project fully deserving of recognition as an exemplary model of conservation and design excellence.

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Team

Lead Perit/i: Valentino Architects

Architectural Design: Valentino Architects

Planning Consulting: Valentino Architects

Structural Engineering: Perit Ivan Muscat

Conservation: Valentino Architects

Interior Design: Valentino Architects

Building Systems Engineering: Beenel

Project Management: Jeffrey Farrugia

Dar San Rokku in Ħaż-Żebbuġ converts a16th century nondescript vernacular heritage building into a three-bedroom home.

The central design intervention is a colonnaded walkway that floats over an inner courtyard and above Triq il-Kbira, activating the conversion with new circulation and animating the street below. The façade extension was designed with controlled transparency, activation, and rhythm in mind – enlisting the formal qualities of the Mediterranean ‘loggia’ as a means to temper an otherwise solid façade, where an elevated walkway unites two ends of the home. Aside from fragmenting the facade, the loggia works as a subtle activation device – building visual rapport between the village street and the life within the house and bringing contemporaneity to a timeless architectural device – building a permeable threshold between street and home.

Prior to intervention, Dar San Rokku’s structure was found to be in a fairly sound state, save for deteriorated timber beams in the arched loggia on the first floor, and an array of broken stone slab ceilings. The internal courtyard walls as well as the facade was found to be plastered in a thick layer of cementitious plaster which although was in a sound state, was compromising the breathability of the stone and causing rising damp to manifest in other areas of the building. The courtyard was largely intact, save for a few accretions which were subsequently removed, together with the cementitious plaster.

The organisation of the plan from its former nondescript and fragmented nature sought to connect spaces whilst maintaining separation and privacy as needed between rooms. At the lower level, circulation was organised along the shortest route beside the courtyard walls, with living functions organised along this route; whilst bedrooms were elevated to the upper level, where three new volumes were designed to radiate around the internal courtyard. The new volumes house two bedrooms and an ensuite bathroom to the main bedroom, which was housed in the existing arched loggia overlooking the courtyard. The new stone volumes at first floor were built using alternating course sizes – two half courses and two full courses – and planed to a smooth finish, in deliberate contrast with the larger and rougher stone blocks of the existing building. The new construction was visually cut off from the old by means of a defined gap.

The material palette is kept minimal throughout the restoration and intervention design. Lime washed white stone walls characterise the ground floor interiors, in contrast to the thick unpainted lime plaster in the courtyard, selected to visually repair the damaged stone walls after the removal of the thick cementitious plaster. Monolithic concrete floors on ground floor contrast with the warmer wooden floors in the bedrooms upstairs. The design for Dar San Rokku looks to strike a balance between preservation and usefulness, resisting the treatment of the original fabric as untouchable or intransigent, looking to celebrate its character through deliberate contrast.

Images © Valentino Architects, Alex Attard

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