Designed as though imprinted by a waffle iron, Valletta, Malta’s capital, is a 16th-century gridded city whose streets are bound by a perimeter of stone bastions. Here, like in many other southern European and Mediterranean cities, townhouses were once built to serve multiple purposes – commercial or production spaces could be found on the ground floor with living quarters above. These centuries-old homes provided the original mixed-use, live-work model that appeared to lose its sheen in Malta in the late 20th century, with light industry moving beyond the city centre and Valetta’s workers commuting to the capital from cosy conurbations, rather than from the upper floors of their homes. But there’s still merit in the model for the city’s residents (and those in similarly built metropolises across the globe) and it is something that architect Chris Briffa is intent on proving.

Born and raised in Birgu, a historic city on the south side of the Grand Harbour, Briffa now lives on Valetta’s St Paul’s Street, which is defined by timber-fronted shop façades and limestone townhouses. “When I told my mum that I was moving to Valletta in 2001 she cried for two days because it was so desolate at the time,” says Briffa as he welcomes monocle to Casa Bottega, his studio and home, where he lives with his wife, Hanna, and three children, Elia, Mira and Finn. “But I saw potential here and I thought that it was only a matter of time before people recognised what we have.”

And it’s this potential that has been realised at Casa Bottega, a once-abandoned townhouse that Briffa, with the help of his namesake design studio, has converted into seven floors of living and working space. Such a concept – of domesticity and creative labour under one roof – had been on the architect’s mind since arriving in the Maltese capital. Then, as a 25-year-old, he lived alone in an 80 sq m apartment with a bathtub in its living room.

“I guess I sincerely believed that you could set an intention with the kind of house you chose to live in,” he says. “If you want to be a bachelor, you live in a flat with a bath in the middle of the living room. But if you’re moving to a house with three bedrooms and space for a family [you might just start one]. In my case, it happened, even though I didn’t yet have a family or a clue that it would come.”

Work on Casa Bottega began in 2014, with Briffa aiming to restore the original townhouse, which had been divided up, and then build upwards, creating space for growth. “That year was the craziest of my life,” he says. “I met Hanna, and Elia came soon after.”

Briffa bought the house, which dates back to the late 1600s, at a court auction. In its former life, the ground floor was used for stabling horses, their muzzles poking into the internal courtyard. The brief for the building’s new iteration was simple: to host a live-work space in the heart of the city. Briffa quickly moved his studio into the structure’s first floor. “It was just a restored ruin then. The element of preserving the skin and bones of the house happened in phase one, while simultaneously planning, designing and dreaming about phase two,” he says. “The fact that we worked here before we lived here gave us a lot of insight into the building – how it functioned, how it didn’t.”

The result is a structure that transitions from working to living as one moves upwards through its floors. It begins with an entrance for both sets of occupants – family and studio – pulling people through a sparse hallway and then towards the building’s restored semi-outdoor stairwell or its new courtyard lift. On the first floor, Chris Briffa Architects still finds a home. Here, designers’ desks run in parallel with three balconies, which let shuttered light into the orderly room. On the second floor, a sala nobile extends across the entire façade with a bespoke shelving system defining the back wall; this timber composition of black lines and subdivisions holds books, architecture models and Briffa’s swelling collection of design curios.

The next level, entered via a staircase, marks the shift from Casa Bottega’s working area to the family home. In lieu of a physical gateway, the ritual of removing shoes as one enters the domestic space separates the live and work components. Footwear in a gamut of sizes – from toddler and child to adult – coalesces on concrete steps. A shared children’s bedroom comes first, with an ensuite bathroom whose marble offcuts recall the loggia tiling at St John’s Square in Valletta. This washroom is enclosed with glass-reeded timber doors, which reference one of Briffa’s earlier projects, an installation called Antiporta at Palazzo Mora in Venice. It was crafted as an ode to the negotiatory role of traditional Maltese interior porches, which are made from translucent glass panelling.

Up another level and the master bedroom is spartan and blanketed by chalky light, which enters through a low-lying glazed strip. This runs along the room’s external-facing wall, leading onto a shallow glass terrace.

The fifth floor is the heart of the home, which can be accessed by stairs or the courtyard lift. The elevator skips the building’s work and sleeping levels, opening directly into this living area, where a semi-outdoor bathroom of weathered timber is the first space seen as its doors open, introducing Briffa’s fidelity to Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki. “When we were laying out the building, I said to my team that we should make a folly at the entrance to the lift because it’s a dark space,” says Briffa. “So I took Tanizaki’s book, In Praise of Shadows, and literally transformed it into an interior.”

Walking past the bathroom, you find an Arclinea kitchen tucked around a curved concrete corner, its stainless-steel configuration shimmering in the light that flows in through flanking glass-block walls. Above the kitchen, a solid-oak mezzanine, dubbed the “three-house”, was built for the children to climb up to and occupy, safe within a bordering netted lining. A timber-and-metal stair system – part rungs, part rails, part shelving – connects the two levels. Across the kitchen, a multi-directional sofa becomes the soft centrepiece of the room (Piero Lissoni’s Extrasoft for Living Divani, to be precise). Throughout the day, peachy rays of sunlight enter through breezy curtains that separate the space from the deep terrace that looks out onto the street.

Briffa grew up in his father’s carpentry workshop before studying in Malta, at Virginia Tech in the US and the Politecnico di Milano. This early experience has informed his obsession with how things fit together, his concern for how they are used and the need to design elegance into every object or experience. Like the whole building itself, many of Casa Bottega’s features are intended to do, or be, more than one thing at once. Off the kitchen area, a timber bench serves as a seat for nightly family meals, before extending downwards to become a stairwell, which leads to a laundry room. Beyond that is a half-height den holding and hiding all of the building’s services.

Perhaps the most defining architectural feature of Casa Bottega is the most challenging to see, unless viewed from the upper levels of the building across the street. Its new floors in concertina concrete are held up by two nine-metre-long beams. They are made from precast concrete, produced off-site with factory precision to satisfy the sharp articulation that Briffa envisioned for their external profile; their folds are as crisp as bent paper. This is one of countless design decisions that he nursed tenaciously over the years. “You do become attached to places that you design, especially when you design them for yourself,” he says. “There’s a need, almost, to continue understanding oneself; it’s an introspective process.”

The final levels of Casa Bottega – its terraces and roof – are what bring the building’s private world back into the city. Aside from extending interiors out into the beating sun, they intentionally added a garden to St Paul’s Street – a piece of the city otherwise dominated by limestone, a road and sky. It’s here, in this new green space, that the family spends days and balmy nights with friends; where the separate functions of city life, work and play merge inexorably, allowing Casa Bottega to set a new benchmark for live-work spaces in Valetta and beyond. — L
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