I've always believed you can set an intention through the kind of home you choose. Live somewhere built for one, and you tend to stay that way; live somewhere with rooms to spare, and a family has a way of finding its way in to fill them. Valletta Vintage began on that same instinct, almost by accident: a spare room above our studio that we started renting out. Within a year it was covering most of the building's mortgage, and we started paying closer attention.

It grew the way a family does: one room, one guest, one piece of furniture at a time, with no plan for what it would become. The Gallery, Library and Atelier took over what had been our old studio on Republic Street. Doma came next, in the house we ourselves lived in before moving to Casa Bottega. A decade later, Scala added five more apartments, each named after a note of the musical scale, DO RE MI FA SOL, after the restored stone staircase they climb toward a rooftop terrace over the harbour. It was only with Scala that we saw this could be something more than a happy accident: ten spaces now, each one different, still changing as we go.

Hanna curates and runs it: the bookings and guest relations, but just as much the furniture, the art, the eye for what belongs where. Between us we've been collecting chairs for years, more than any house could reasonably hold: a scattered, growing family of orphans waiting for a room worth sitting in. Valletta Vintage has become the place many of them finally do - vintage and mid-century pieces alongside local, contemporary work - each apartment its own small argument for how a historic building might still be lived in, not just preserved.

It's less a hospitality brand than a home that was never going to stop growing anyway.