This proposal reimagines the site of the derelict Jerma Palace Hotel, once the largest hotel in the south of Malta, built in 1982 and closed since 2007; a closure the seaside village of Marsaskala has never quite recovered from. The hotel's footprint sits beside St Thomas Tower, a four-bastioned coastal fort built in 1614 after the last major Ottoman landing on the island; and the last fort of this scale the Knights would build.

The design takes its cues from the fort itself: its pentagonal bulwarks, inclined walls, and strong lines of sight became the starting point for a scheme that fans outward from the tower like lines of fire from an old battle. A vast public piazza wraps the fort and steps down toward the sea, reconnecting a promenade that today swerves inland around the site, cutting the town off from its own coastline. Around this piazza, medium-rise apartments and a hotel step down in height to meet the surrounding streets, sliced through by a run of vertical lightwells that break the mass into a series of slim towers and open sightlines back to the fort. Terraced villas step down further still toward the shore, each built as a triple-height volume with an internal void left free of structure; giving future owners the freedom to reconfigure, or even entirely redesign, the space without touching the building's envelope.Recycled limestone from the existing ruins is proposed for the hard landscaping throughout the site.

At the centre of it all sits the fort, restored to what Jerma Palace took away: an uninterrupted line to the sea.