Named after a machine that is no longer there: Cugó Gran Macina, Senglea

DESIGN TRAVEL · MALTA

Reading time: 10 min

Il-Maċina was a masting crane, a set of great timber sheer legs on a bastion that lifted masts and lowered them into the galleys of the Order of St John. The legs came down into the creek in 1927 and the machine has been gone for a century. Its cast-iron hinges are still bolted to the stone, and the hotel built into the bastion has deliberately left them where they are.

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Senglea occupies a narrow peninsula on Malta’s Grand Harbour, one of the Three Cities looking across Dockyard Creek at Vittoriosa. It is barely half a square mile, it is one of the most densely populated places in the country, and it is fortified to a degree that is difficult to take in until you stand on it.

At the tip of the peninsula is the Sheer Bastion, raised in 1554 under Grand Master Claude de la Sengle, the man the city is named after. Eleven years later Senglea held out through the Great Siege and was given the title Città Invicta, the Unconquered City.

On top of that bastion, for something like four centuries, stood il-Maċina.

Since 2018 the building beneath it has been a 21 suite hotel, restored by EM Architects under Dr Edwin Mintoff with Architect Pietro Di Raimondo, with interiors by DAAA Haus, the studio founded by Keith Pillow. It won the European Special Prize for Exterior Hotel Design at the Prix Versailles in 2019 and a Gold German Design Award for Excellence in Interior Architecture in 2020, which is a rare double, and it is the reason this building is worth writing about carefully.

What the machine actually was

It is worth being precise about the machine, because the machine explains the building.

A masting sheer is a permanent shipyard structure: a masonry tower or plinth carrying a pair of raking timber legs above it. Small vessels can have their masts stepped by rope, pivoting the mast about its foot. Once hulls get beyond a certain size that becomes impossible, and you need a device that can lift a whole mast vertically and lower it straight down through the deck of a ship moored below. By the eighteenth century every serious shipyard had one.

Malta’s stood on the Sheer Bastion, above the water at the head of Dockyard Creek, and it was built of hardwood.

Its end came in three stages rather than one, which is a better story than the version usually told. In 1864 the British replaced the timber arms with iron. In 1886 an Armstrong Mitchell hydraulic crane made it obsolete, and the old machine was swung back against the bastion so that it would not obstruct the harbour. And on 27 February 1927 it was finally dismantled, the arms dropped into the creek while the dockyard siren sounded and crowds gathered to watch. The splash was reported as throwing up a wave thirty-five feet high.

After that the building worked as a semaphore station, then as dockyard police headquarters, then as offices and medical rooms. It was severely damaged in the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe raid of January 1941 on the dockyard took out most of Senglea. It served as a political party headquarters into the 1990s, and then it stood empty.

Everything new declares itself as new

Here is the argument the restoration makes, and it runs through every decision in the building.

Nothing added to the Maċina pretends to be old. In a country full of honey-coloured limestone, where a sympathetic new wall can be made to disappear entirely, that is a deliberate and disciplined position, and it is why the original fabric reads so clearly.

The vault is the clearest case. The section wrecked in the war was rebuilt in concrete, and the architects say plainly why: so that the intervention would be visually distinguishable from the remaining original masonry. That is the Venice Charter position, applied without hedging, in the most prominent space in the hotel.

The façade was dressed by hand. Rather than abrasive or chemical cleaning, the weathered stone was taken back by careful chiselling, the traditional Maltese technique for globigerina limestone. That stone, ġebla tal-franka, is soft enough to saw and hardens on exposure, which is why it built the temples, Mdina, Valletta and more than sixty kilometres of fortification, and it was formally designated a Global Heritage Stone Resource in 2019. Chiselling works with it. Grit blasting does not.

The new insertions are dark. A panoramic lift and a lightweight bridge linking the two halves of the building are the principal new architectural gestures, and alongside them come slate, lava stone, lacquered raw steel and black-painted handrails on the mezzanines, set against chalky white and honey limestone. The colour scheme is not decoration. It is a legend. Dark means 2018. Pale means 1554.

And the crane fixings stayed. Every metal fixture belonging to the historic mechanism was preserved and left visible, so the cast-iron hinges of the masting sheer remain legible on the masonry plinth. The machine is gone and its fixings are still there, which is the most eloquent thing in the building.

Rooms shaped by a fortress

There are 21 suites and no standard rooms, ranging from 40 to 130 square metres across six categories, in a gross floor area of about 1,940 square metres.

No two are alike, and that is a consequence rather than a flourish. The bays of a bastion are not repetitive, so the suites that occupy them cannot be either. Some have mezzanines, some are duplexes, and several contain five hundred year old arches. The vaulted stone ceilings run to five metres.

The best single detail in the hotel is about thickness. At some windows there is a three and a half metre walk from the room to the opening, because that is how deep the fortification wall is. It would have been simple to line that out and gain the floor area. Keeping it means you walk through the wall on the way to the view, and the building tells you exactly what it was built to withstand.

The palette DAAA Haus laid over that is restrained and warm. Limed oak. Maltese hard stone, the harder coralline limestone, as an inserted finish alongside the soft globigerina. Carrara marble. Custom tinted glass. Custom tufted wool rugs and muted, neutral upholstery. Furniture is bespoke to the studio, with Scandinavian pieces and Italian sofas and beds among it, and the artwork was commissioned locally from the Maltese artist Victor Agius, who works in raw clay and earth.

Lighting is doing careful work throughout, grazing the arched masonry and the vaults so that the geometry of the stone is what you notice rather than the fittings.

Keith Pillow’s own line on the scheme is the right one to keep: “every space, even white walls speak volumes although bare exude elegance and luxury.” The German Design Award jury put it another way, praising a hotel that “looks extremely modern and forms an exciting contrast to the existing buildings” while holding a luxurious standard throughout.

The roof, and a pool you cannot see

The rooftop is the Sheer Bastion itself, 930 square metres of it, and it does two jobs.

It is a terrace and events space with room for up to a thousand people, looking straight across the Grand Harbour at Vittoriosa and Cospicua and the great mass of Fort St Angelo.

And it holds a pool and solarium, which is where the restoration pulls off its quietest trick. The pool is set down inside the existing balustrades, so from the harbour, from the ferry, from the Valletta bastions opposite, the silhouette of the Sheer Bastion is unchanged. Swim in it and you are inside a piece of sixteenth century fortification. Look at it from outside and there is nothing to see. That is exactly the right answer for a building on a fortified skyline, and it took real restraint to arrive at.

Below, the restaurant is The Little Bastion, contemporary Mediterranean with a wine list weighted towards Maltese producers, under head chef Johann Costa since March 2024. There is a private pontoon for arrival by water, and treatments are delivered in suite by visiting therapists rather than from a fixed spa.

The whole rehabilitation took more than 40,000 hours of work.

The two studios behind it

EM Architects was founded in 1986 by Dr Edwin Mintoff and is based in Gżira, with more than forty people and an unusually integrated in-house offer covering architecture, urban planning, interiors, structural engineering and surveying. Mintoff is both an architect and a civil engineer, and was among the first Maltese architects to hold a doctorate in architecture and urban design.

His framing of heritage work is simple and it describes this project exactly: historic structures offer the chance to “combine preservation with innovation.” On hospitality he adds that such buildings need “a distinct lens”, and should be read as experiences rather than as structures. The practice’s other work runs through Domus Zamittello and the Romégas Hotel in Valletta, Hotel Verdi in Gżira and the restoration of the AUM British Building.

DAAA Haus was founded in 2009 by Keith Pillow and now runs from Milan, Malta, Ragusa and Mumbai, working across interiors, architecture, branding and product design, with its own furniture and lighting arm. Pillow tests every project against five things: that it is iconic and memorable, emotional, functional, affordable and timeless.

His own account of what design is for is worth having. A space, he says, should make “the experience of living in it better, more fun, and more meaningful.” And on method: “We go beyond designing functional spaces, we design concepts.” The studio’s other work includes The Cumberland in Valletta and seven state rooms at San Anton Palace, the presidential residence.

The hotel is operated by the Cugó Gran Collection with IBB Hotels, part of the Von der Heyden Group, and it was the first Design Hotels member in Malta.

Where it sits, and why that matters

The Grand Harbour is one of the great designed landscapes of Europe and it is almost entirely a work of defence.

The Order of St John arrived in 1530 and chose these peninsulas over inland Mdina because of the deep water. The foundation stone of Fort St Michael was laid on 8 May 1552. Senglea’s walls went up through that decade, the Sheer Bastion among them. After the Knights moved across to Valletta the whole area was re-armoured again, with the Santa Margherita Lines and then the seven kilometre ring of the Cottonera Lines.

The harbour fortifications have been on UNESCO’s Tentative List since 1998, as the Knights’ Fortifications around the Harbours of Malta, covering something like twenty-five kilometres of works. The casemated rampart at the Maċina is entered on the National Inventory of the Cultural Property of the Maltese Islands.

Putting a hotel inside that is a serious responsibility, and the reason this one has collected the awards it has is that it treats the responsibility as the design brief rather than as a constraint to be worked around.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The pleasure of this building is that you can read it.

Stand in the entrance and the concrete vault tells you where the bombs fell. Walk to a window and the three and a half metres between you and the glass tell you what a bastion wall is. Look at the handrail and the slate and the blackened steel and you know instantly what arrived in 2018. Look at the chiselled limestone and the arches and you know what has been there since the decade before the Great Siege. Nothing is disguised and nothing is faked, and the building is far more moving for it.

And then there are the hinges. The Maċina was a machine that lifted masts into galleys, and it has been gone for very nearly a hundred years. What is left of it is a handful of cast-iron fixings on a stone plinth, easy to miss and easier still to remove.

They are still there. The hotel is named after a machine you cannot see, and its architects made sure you can still find where it was bolted on.