Malta is obsessed by its appearance, its private appearance, or its appearance in private, that is. Hair stylists, nail technicians, clothes stores abound all over the island from north to south, from city to village, from Malta to Gozo. Bathroom showrooms, furniture stores or the amount of them are testament to our national obsession with looking good, with our homes looking good.

This, in a way, shows the world we are doing okay, despite credit crunches, recessions and high bills and very delayed or unpaid invoices, if you listen to the business community. Witness the lavish expense at a Maltese wedding just in terms of the appearance of the guests, all in freshly-bought dresses, make up that looks like it has taken hours to do, heels making the average size 14 or 16 look like a size 10 or 12 and why not and you wonder how all this can be afforded by all.

Everyone literally looking as shiny and clean as the average Maltese home, however humble.

Sit down at Giorgios at The Ferries on a Saturday afternoon or near Cordina's on a Sunday morning and watch the parade of Maltese women with their hair freshly blow dried, their newly-lacquered nails, their clothes pressed on and around their sometimes bursting bodies. The, look at the guys with their expensive jeans and sometimes gym-toned pecs, tops perhaps pressed by mama or the East European cleaner, hair perfectly in place. Their cars, sparkling and shiny despite the dust, the dirt, the general pollution of the environment.

But just walk along and up to Tignè, home of a quarter of a million euro apartments in abundance and you wonder if this island has been a war zone? Terrible roads-cum-dirt tracks, collapsed pavements along Dragut Street, dog pooh you have to avoid, airborne dust from the new project where another island of sanity or insanity is being created. A concrete jungle is almost a nice way of putting it.

However, if you go inside one of these apartments your impression of Malta and the Maltese reverts again to a very proud group of people obsessed by things looking good. Fabulous interiors thanks also to Malta's small army of successful interior designers contrasting awkwardly and awfully with a slummy exterior. And this is not the back street of Ħamrun or Marsa, where sometimes you find better maintained streets anyway and prettier residential areas much to many Northerners surprise. This is Malta's prime real estate, prime residential area where some of Malta's wealthy middle classes live and it is gob smackingly badly looked after, designed and kept. When you arrive in Malta you go through the airport and you see good improvement. It is inside and controllable maybe.

You visit a restaurant like Zest in St Julians and besides the great food you once again enjoy Pippa Toledo's interior design work, which still hasn't faded and dated. You visit your uncle in the café of the new Palace Hotel in what is left of lovely old Sliema around the Stella Maris area where I used to visit my grandmother every Sunday, and you admire the welcoming, smart and stylish Florence-style chic interiors of Joanna Fleri Soler. You receive an invitation to one of your friends who have recently moved and again you enjoy the boho chic with a Latin flavour that make Katya Viedersum's interiors so refreshing, and new Maltese.

But where are our exterior designers? Who looks after, takes responsibility for Malta's outside living rooms? Or who thinks it does? Mepa? Local council offices, where you see more design challenges than elsewhere so that's a worry if we expect them to lead? The offices of our very many architects? Other government departments? The design houses of our better homes publications? The talent must be there and is there. If we manage to make the interiors of Malta look good we should be able to do the same with our exteriors or, at least, manage the rot and deterioration a little better.

Are we harnessing the talents of those who know how to make Malta's interior's look good, of Malta's architects, interior designers and design-literate people? Those with trained eyes? Those with a sense of style and design? Or, despite making fun of Dom Mintoff and the style of old socialism as experienced by Malta in the 1970s, are we just happy to have made Malta look even worse, despite our exposure to travel, education and international influence?

Aren't we embarrassed by what an exterior we have created despite some pockets of loveliness like for example the area around Castille, which is the only bit where almost every bit has been improved and looked after?

We could do a lot better. We could have key people in charge of the outside look of certain pockets of Malta and at least start with those areas where tourists visit, where we and our families enjoy our cafe lifestyle and socialise and people watch.

Better designing, improving and maintaining Malta and Gozo's outside living rooms could improve our sense of well being, reduce the amount of stress generated by having to live in so much concrete ugliness and perhaps help to make this archipelago one tourists want to even return to, as they indeed used to once.

m_micallef@sky.com