Inside Casa Bonavita: Malta’s Luxury Boutique Hotel in a Historic Palazzo (Rooms, Spa, Prices)

Malta is changing, slowly. For two decades the island’s tourism ran on cheap flights, cheaper Airbnbs and a stock of dated resort hotels along the St Julian’s and Sliema waterfront — volume over quality, and a summer crush to match.

The shift toward something better is now visible: Six Senses is building its first Mediterranean resort on Comino, the tiny island between Malta and Gozo, with 71 suites and a 1,000-square-meter spa due in 2027, and across Valletta, the Three Cities and the villages of the interior, a new generation of small boutique hotels is opening inside restored palazzi and old family maisons rather than in new concrete on the coast. The Maltese government has started saying “quality tourism” out loud.

The newest of these — and the most complete expression of the idea so far — is Casa Bonavita, a luxury spa boutique hotel in the village of Attard that opened on 15 May 2026.

Fifteen years ago, Christopher and Suzanne Sharp — the couple who founded The Rug Company, the London house behind some of the most collected rugs of the past three decades — walked into a dilapidated 18th-century palazzo here and, by their own account, were bewitched.

They bought it, moved their family in, and spent years learning how the light traveled through its rooms before deciding it should become the small hotel they had dreamed about since their twenties. It opened with 17 bedrooms, two garden pools, a frescoed restaurant led by a River Café-trained chef, and a subterranean spa — and Tatler Travel had already called it possibly the most romantic hotel opening of the year before a single guest checked in.

In August, Malta’s Prime Minister Robert Abela formally opened the house, noting an investment of more than €8 million and, tellingly, that every trade involved — stonework, carpentry, the lot — was Maltese. This is not a hotel that was imported. It grew out of the village.

A Family Home First, a Hotel Second

The house was built as the country estate of the Bonavita family, one of Malta’s old landed names, in the village of Attard — one of the “Three Villages” (with Balzan and Lija) that sit in the island’s green interior, about twenty minutes from Valletta and a short walk from San Anton Palace, the President’s official residence, and its public gardens.

What separates Casa Bonavita from the wave of palazzo conversions across Malta is that the Sharps lived here before they opened it. Christopher Sharp has spoken about learning the house’s rhythms through every season — how the sun crosses the garden, which rooms need the shutters closed at noon, why a ceiling fan often beats air conditioning on a Maltese evening. Suzanne Sharp, who grew up on the island, has said her inspiration was memory rather than any design style: cool stone floors, shuttered rooms, family houses filled with objects collected over generations, gardens that seemed slightly overgrown.

“Casa Bonavita was never conceived as a commercial exercise; it was the opportunity to fulfil a dream.” — Christopher Sharp

The result is a hotel that, in their words, is meant to feel like the home of a particularly fortunate friend.

The House: Frescoes, Murals and Hand-Painted Everything

The interiors are the work of Suzanne Sharp’s London practice, Suzanne Sharp Studio, working with the couple’s son, the antiques dealer Jamie Sharp, who spent years sourcing furniture, Murano glass lighting, ceramics and art with the single brief that each piece should feel as though it had already lived a life.

The signature move is paint. As the restoration uncovered traces of how color had once been used in the house, the Sharps commissioned hand-painted murals across walls and ceilings throughout — each designed for its specific room, so no two spaces repeat.

The most spectacular is in the restaurant, where the artists Alfonso Orombelli and Luna Aulehla Greppi painted a leafy garden scene that wraps the walls and ceiling, effectively bringing the courtyard indoors.

The Valletta Bar is wrapped in a bespoke de Gournay wallpaper depicting the capital in the 17th century, kept in low light for classic cocktails that drift late. Even the lampshades were hand-painted — by artists from the pottery studio five minutes’ walk away.

Seventeen Rooms, No Two Alike

Because of the building’s age, every room at Casa Bonavita boutique hotel is different. Almost all have their own outdoor space — a balcony, a terrace, a garden — and most are furnished with antiques, tiled bathrooms and, in the larger categories, freestanding tubs.

Rates per night, two-night minimum. Rooms sleep two. Whole-house private takeovers are available.

Two rooms deserve a closer look. The Folly is a stand-alone oval building in its own walled garden — date palms, bougainvillea and a swimming pool for the sole use of its guests — which makes it one of the more private hotel rooms in the Mediterranean.

And Room Five, the only suite inside the Main House, has a bathroom set within the estate’s former chapel beneath a domed ceiling, with a private terrace over the gardens; Wallpaper* called it the best room in the house.

The Restaurant: A River Café Alumnus and a Lacanche Range

The kitchen is led by Executive Chef Dex Oseman, trained at London’s River Café — which tells you most of what you need to know about the cooking: exceptional produce, simple and unfussy, seasonal, Mediterranean. Sea bass, verdura mista, buffalo mozzarella, orange tarts left to cool on the kitchen table.

The restaurant sits in that frescoed room, furnished with rattan chairs and small tables, and opens through a run of arches onto a flagstone courtyard beneath orange trees for outdoor dining. Its heart is a working, open house kitchen clad in Sicilian tiles around a Lacanche range, where pastries bake in the morning, pasta is made by hand, and guests are encouraged to drift in for tea and cake in the afternoon. In the evening the restaurant welcomes outside diners as well as hotel guests — worth knowing if you’re staying in Valletta and want one dinner in the countryside.

The garden dining is the romantic version: private tables set among the greenery, candlelit, under date palms and old olives, with church bells carrying across the village. Sample lunch and dinner menus are on the hotel’s site; tables are booked through SevenRooms.

The Gardens

Christopher Sharp took the gardens. When they bought the house, the structure was there but the planting was tired and the citrus trees were failing; his approach was to overplant — twelve full-sized palms went in, plus a wide understory of smaller trees and shrubs — and to break the garden into a sequence of enclosed spaces so that it unfolds as you walk rather than revealing itself at once.

He has been specific about wanting the garden to be remembered through sound and scent as much as sight: jasmine in the evening, orange blossom in spring, herbs releasing their oils in the heat, wind in the palm crowns, crickets on a hot afternoon. Two outdoor pools sit within it, decorated with Moroccan tiles and shaded by palms, with lunch and drinks served poolside from an outdoor bar.

The Spa Below the House

The spa is underground — a tiled sanctuary in deep-green zellige and intricate Moroccan tilework, paired with floral English fabrics in what Wallpaper* described as a meeting of English and Moorish pattern. The sauna is a large KLAFS Sanarium, which lets guests dial temperature and humidity between settings and add aromatic infusions; beside it is a cold plunge and a hammam. The gym is fitted with Technogym machines and free weights, and there are treatment rooms for massages, facials and scrubs, plus a quiet relaxation room with tea and infused water between sessions.

Attard, and What’s Within Walking Distance

Attard is the least touristed corner of Malta most visitors never see — a baroque village of walled gardens and quiet lanes in the island’s interior. Five minutes’ walk from the hotel is Villa Bologna Pottery, the celebrated ceramics studio, shop and restaurant in the gardens of an 18th-century baroque estate, owned by the Sharps’ daughter Sophie Edwards; the hotel arranges pottery-painting afternoons there. San Anton Gardens, one of the island’s loveliest public parks, is minutes away.

Valletta — St John’s Co-Cathedral, the Grandmaster’s Palace — is twenty minutes by car, and the hotel’s spring program runs to clifftop wildflower walks, the Neolithic temples (the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world), Carnival and Holy Week processions, and day trips to Gozo.

More from Locals Insider.

For the rest of the island, our Malta section covers where to stay, eat and swim beyond Valletta.

If Casa Bonavita’s design-led, small-scale approach is your kind of hotel, our guide to boutique hotels in Barcelona away from the crowds and our round-up of new, small and cozy hotels in Paris are the same idea in two other cities.

And for the booking itself, our guides to Booking.com promo codes and Genius discounts and Agoda promo codes and VIP tiers explain how to save on stays like this one when they appear on the big platforms.