When a friend asked me to take a look at a small shop on Republic Street, I was wary of taking on a building site in such a location, bound by strict heritage regulations, its shutters still dressed in the signage of a seventies clothing store. Mentioning the shop to my mother over dinner, I found out she'd worked behind that same counter as a teenager, selling clothes in the very room I was now considering. Curious enough to go further, we travelled to Geneva to sit with Rolex's own team at their headquarters, and came away drawn to the challenge of designing something distinctly ours within a brand identity as tightly controlled as theirs.

Every Rolex boutique uses a version of the aquaglass wall, a backlit panel of wavy green resin. Rather than place it upright as the brand typically does, we set it flat into the floor above the basement, turning it into a skylight. Green, filtered light drops down through it into the room below, bounced off limestone and lit like something underwater. The idea met some resistance at first; once built, it became the space's defining feature.

Working within Valletta's main pedestrian street brought its own constraints: narrow access, daily bureaucratic holdups, a construction team moving materials by hand through crowds of shoppers. None of it shows in the finished space. What stands now is a small, exacting shop built to Rolex's global standard, carrying our own instincts for light and spatial richness into a tight Valletta footprint.