A Rug Empire's Founders Build a House to Live In, and Call It a Hotel

Casa Bonavita transforms an 18th-century Maltese villa into a 17-room boutique hotel by The Rug Company founders — layered, personal, and deeply rooted in Maltese craft and history.

Christopher and Suzanne Sharp, co-founders of The Rug Company, spent years thinking about the hotel they would have wanted to find travelling — intimate, cultured, layered, human. When they acquired an eighteenth-century villa in the quiet Maltese village of Attard and began living in it, they understood, gradually and then completely, that they had already found it. Casa Bonavita, which opened as a seventeen-room boutique hotel after five years of restoration and fifteen years of replanting its gardens, is the result of that understanding made physical.

The building dates to 1740 and sits on the island of Malta surrounded by the particular quality of Mediterranean light that Suzanne, who spent part of her childhood on the island, understands instinctively. It was her eye — trained through decades in the textile industry, where colour, texture, and the long history of making are understood as inseparable — that shaped the interior's layered visual language. Hand-painted Sicilian tiles, de Gournay wallpapers, Murano glass chandeliers, suzani textiles, and murals by artists Alfonso Orombelli and Luna Aulehla Greppi accumulate across the rooms without a rigid formula or predetermined scheme. The hotel, as the Sharps describe it, grew organically through instinct, craftsmanship, and shared imagination.

We imagined the hotel we ourselves would have wanted to find travelling: intimate, cultured, layered, human — a place with a soul rather than a perfect place.

The furniture and paintings throughout come largely from their personal collection, assembled over twenty years of deliberate looking. The original kitchen was preserved alongside a professional one — because for the Sharps, the kitchen is the heart of any home, and they wanted guests to feel that warmth rather than the cooler efficiency of conventional hospitality. Every object, they say, was chosen not only for its beauty but for the atmosphere, the memory, or the sense of continuity it could bring to the space.

The Rug Company's founding philosophy — that the ancient art of carpet weaving could be read in a new contemporary chapter, in full respect of its history and craft — finds its natural continuation here. Casa Bonavita proposes the same thing for an island: a place that deepens rather than decorates a visitor's understanding of Malta, its character, and the qualities that make it genuinely singular.
Seventeen rooms. One very long act of attention.

Key takeaways

• Christopher and Suzanne Sharp spent five years restoring a 1740 villa in Attard and fifteen years replanting its gardens before opening Casa Bonavita as a seventeen-room boutique hotel — preserving the original kitchen, filling the rooms with their personal collection of furniture and paintings, and treating every object as a carrier of atmosphere and memory rather than mere decoration.
• The interior's layered visual language — hand-painted Sicilian tiles, de Gournay wallpapers, Murano glass chandeliers, suzani textiles, and site-specific murals by Alfonso Orombelli and Luna Aulehla Greppi — grew without a rigid formula, shaped by Suzanne's textile design sensibility and her deep personal connection to Malta, where she spent part of her childhood.
• Casa Bonavita is conceived as a direct continuation of The Rug Company's founding philosophy: just as the Sharps sought to bring an ancient craft tradition into a new contemporary chapter, they now apply the same sensibility to hospitality — privileging art, storytelling, local craftsmanship, and emotional connection equally alongside comfort and service.