Casa Perellos, Valletta

A palazzino on a street the guidebooks do not send anyone down, which is the whole of its charm. The façade is unremarkable until the door, and the door is the point: a dolphin knocker, worn smooth on the left side by two centuries of right hands.

Inside, the piano nobile runs the width of the building. The third balcony — the superfluous one — opens off a room too small to furnish and too pleasant to remove.

Never advertised. It came to us through the family's notary, who had been told a year earlier what we were looking for and remembered.