Making Xara Palace: Lineage, Design, Identity is a research and documentation project that chronicles the architectural, social, and cultural reinvention of Xara Palace – the 18th-century noble residence in Mdina restored and adapted into a contemporary hotel by AP Valletta in the late 1990s. Positioned against Mdina’s reputation as a static and untouchable historic city, the project frames Xara Palace as a case study in heritage resilience, continuity, and meaningful reuse.
 

Working with the Zammit Tabona family – the stewards and owners of Xara Palace – as well as writer and editor Ann Dingli, APFHF envisions the publication as a comprehensive record of the palace’s evolution, situating its Baroque origins, periods of alteration and decline, and subsequent rehabilitation within the wider architectural and social history of Mdina. The publication will foreground the restoration process as a negotiation between conservation and contemporary inhabitation – a journey through reinstating spatial hierarchies, materials, and craftsmanship while introducing the infrastructural demands of modern hospitality.

It will also be a story of patronage, tracing a journey of acquisition and a commercial vision inseparable from the palace’s architecture. The book will be structured around three narrative threads – Lineage, Design, and Identity – chronicling the palace’s ownership, architectural transformation, and the cultivation of its material and artistic character and leadership in Malta’s hospitality lineage. Oral histories, archival research, and contemporary photography will converge to document both the building’s restoration process and its modern endurance. Making Xara Palace positions the palace’s intentional evolution as an exemplar of heritage-led development, demonstrating how adaptive reuse can generate cultural, economic, and communal value.