Strait Street, Valletta's narrowest, was once the city's red-light district, nicknamed The Gut by the sailors who passed through its bars. By the early 1980s, its bordellos and go-go bars, including the once-famous Silver Horse, had closed. The street stayed dormant for three decades.

In 2015, the studio restored the building's facade at the street's lower end, reinstated lapsed permits, and redesigned the shopfronts for individual lease, each keeping its own identity while reading as one place.

What tied them together was a stage, cantilevered at the street's lowest point on a one-year permit, with the slope serving as auditorium. The shopfronts drew on the street's 1920s signage, each keeping its old bar's name worked into the woodwork behind.

The stage came down once its permit expired, and with it went some of the street's conviviality.