I lived next door to this house for eight years before I ever set foot inside it. It sat dilapidated, structurally unsafe, abandoned, built around 1650: older than most of its neighbours on St Paul Street which date to the 1800s. When it came up at court auction, I bought it and spent five years turning it into my studio, and eventually, built my home on top.

The ground floor, with its vaulted entrance, once stabled horses. Visitors are announced by an old metal handbell, salvaged from my grandmother's house in Birgu; past it, the entrance opens into reception, meeting room, and an arched basement workshop. We restored the original structure first, keeping its tiles, apertures and textures intact, then moved the studio into the first floor while the upper storeys were still only a plan. The second floor, the sala nobile, settled into something without fixed function: part library, part music room, part screening room, my own thinking space in the afternoon.

Above this the building changes register. Our current home rests on two precast concrete beams, carried onto the party walls so nothing new presses down on the house beneath. Steel railings trace the beams' serrated edges; folding doors pack away into a steel unit, dissolving the line between inside and out, and the roof's greenery frames views toward both harbours.

The house holds two lives at once: family above, studio below, joined by a glass-and-steel lift that carries you straight past one into the other. They rarely stay separate for long. My children wander down into the studio after school, and the team comes up to the sala nobile or the roof terrace when the day allows. Above the kitchen, a netted mezzanine, the “treehouse,” keeps the youngest close while we cook.

We moved in in 2020. Casa Bottega hasn't stopped changing since, a house and studio still working out, year by year, how much of each it wants to be.

Its fuller story is told in Before During and After Us: Casa Bottega, published in 2024.