Four houses on the wall
The address is St Barbara Bastion, the old defensive wall on the harbour side of the city, where the ground simply drops away to the water. Iniala has taken four 17th-century townhouses along it and turned them into twenty-three rooms, and the thing to know before you book is that three different studios did the work.
Autoban from Istanbul ran most of the interiors and kept what mattered: the stone vaults, a painted staircase, a frescoed cupola. A-cero from Madrid brought the sculptural, near-monastic suites in poured concrete. DAAA Haus, the Maltese studio, leaned into the island's own stone and craft.
From jungle to bare concrete
So the place swings from a bedroom papered floor-to-ceiling in hand-painted jungle to a grey cell with a boulder for a headboard. The range is the point: each house keeps its own temper, and the studios were left to follow their instincts rather than a single brief.
It means no two stays are quite the same, and that you should choose your room the way you would choose a restaurant, by mood.
Choose your room the way you would choose a restaurant, by mood.
Two stars over the harbour
On the top floor is ION Harbour, Simon Rogan's first restaurant outside Britain and the only kitchen in Malta to hold two Michelin stars. The cooking follows his usual creed, farm and sea to plate, much of the produce grown for the table, and the room hands you the whole Grand Harbour through glass while you eat.
Below it the hotel keeps a quieter sea-level spot, ION at Sea, and a spa, Essensi, set into the original stone undercroft where the temperature drops the moment you walk down the steps.
Valletta is one of the great small capitals, and for years it had nowhere of this order to stay. Iniala fixed that without playing safe. The eclecticism is the point, and also the risk: a couple of the rooms try harder than they need to, and the four-house layout means a little walking between your bed, your dinner and the bar. None of that undoes the basic fact. This is a serious design hotel with a serious kitchen, built into the walls of a working harbour town, and there is nothing else on the island that comes close. That is why it is in VANE.
