Guests often pause upon entering The Xara Palace, drawn to the enormous antique church door opposite the entrance. They may not know exactly what it is, but they immediately sense that it is not something found in an ordinary hotel. In many ways, the door reflects the character of the building itself.
Built in the early 17th century as a noble palazzo for Baroness Xara within the bastions of Mdina, the building has since been guided by one idea: to preserve its identity rather than reinvent it. The limestone walls, vaulted ceilings, noble proportions, and the building’s position within Mdina’s fortifications already carry a Baroque feel of their own, and the design approach throughout has been to work with that character rather than layer something new on top of it.
Furnishing the hotel meant looking for pieces with their own past attached to them: period furniture, religious objects, antique Maltese craftsmanship, architectural fragments rescued and given a place again. Places with a past and a story, rather than pieces that simply looked good in a photograph. The hotel was not decorated. It was curated, room by room, with each piece set where the proportions of the space called for it.
Old and new, side by side
Walk around The Xara Palace, and the pairing becomes obvious: stone archways framing modern Maltese paintings, older furniture pieces gathered beneath trailing vines, daylight moving across it all as the day goes on. Altar fragments, carved liturgical pieces, and antique mirrors share space comfortably with newer work, including pieces by Antonio Sciortino. It is that back-and-forth between periods, more than any single object, that gives the hotel’s interiors their design language and keeps them from settling into any one era.
None of it came together overnight. The collection grew slowly on purpose, avoiding matching sets or repeated arrangements from one room to the next, which is a large part of why no two suites feel the same. Every room has been shaped around its own architecture rather than fitted into a template. In de Mondion, there are antique plates that once belonged to the Zammit Tabona family’s own home; elsewhere, old Maltese clocks known as Arloġġi tal-Lira hang quietly on the walls. Rich Parisian textiles and quality linen finish the look, softening the stone without hiding it. Even the confessionals tucked into a couple of unlikely corners of the building follow the same logic, small details built to make guests stop and look twice.
Art as part of the stay
Most guests choosing a hotel are after more than somewhere to sleep. They want a feel for the place, some sense of the region and what it holds. Art is one of the more direct ways a hotel can deliver that, though it needs to be more than a couple of framed pieces above the bed. Done well, art becomes woven into the hotel’s identity, and design is what lets it settle into a space naturally instead of looking like an afterthought.
The atrium is a good example of this. The art on display rotates regularly, with exhibitions where different local artists get the space to show and sell their work, bringing the art to people rather than the other way around. Plenty of visitors still walk in off the streets of Mdina just to have a look, locals included, drawn by the contents displayed within The Xara Palace.
It is a minor detail in the running of a hotel, but it shifts what the building represents to the people nearby. Somewhere people wander into out of curiosity carries a different feel from somewhere they only cross through on the way to collect a room key.
Art has a way of making people slow down and pay closer attention. Paired with a building that already carries centuries of history, it gives guests a reason to stay a while longer and take real notice of how each piece found its place.
