Villa Bologna Pottery

Villa Bologna Pottery
Attard, Malta

The story of Villa Bologna Pottery begins in the 1920s at a Baroque house in Attard, Malta, home to Sir Gerald Strickland — who would become Malta's Prime Minister — and his wife Margaret Hulton, heiress to a vast publishing fortune. Margaret fell in love with Malta's unconventional charm and, together with her friend Count Giuseppe Teuma Castelletti, a keen ceramicist, founded what became St Mary's Ceramics in 1924 — the first ceramics factory in Malta. During the Second World War the original factory was destroyed by enemy bombing, and the pottery moved to the old stables of Villa Bologna, where it has remained ever since.

Now over a century old, Villa Bologna is the island's oldest working pottery. Today a team of ten artisans handmakes and hand-paints every piece, continuing a design vocabulary largely established in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Each piece carries the weight of that history without being burdened by it — the colours are unmistakably Mediterranean, the forms functional, the painting done by hand on every individual piece.

In 2020, Sophie and Rowley Edwards went into business with Jasper de Trafford, a family friend whose family has owned Villa Bologna since the 1890s. Sophie's mother is Maltese and she spent her early childhood on the island, with the pottery woven into those memories. Rowley and Sophie had married at Villa Bologna in 2017, and after five years working in East Africa, moving to Malta — and to the pottery — felt like a return rather than a relocation. Their stewardship has been about refinement rather than reinvention: new designs introduced carefully alongside the iconic archive, the same ten-person team of artisans.

Malta is a place we know well and return to often. Villa Bologna Pottery is one of the reasons. There is something specific about an object made on an island — the scale, the limitation, the singular identity — that you don't find in larger production centres. These pieces carry that quality. They age beautifully and they travel well.

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