01Boutique hospitalityConcept project
The Saltmere House
Selling the room, not the rate.
- Year
- 2026
- Typical timeline
- 8 weeks
- Sector
- Boutique hospitality
- Live site
- Visit the site (opens in a new tab)
- Work completed
- Art directionWeb designCopywritingWeb developmentConversion design
The Saltmere House does not exist. Its website does. Six rooms in a flint house above the sea near Cromer, each different enough that choosing between them should be the pleasure of booking — and a site built to make sure it is.
The brief
A brief we set ourselves: an adults-only guesthouse of six rooms, two hosts and a walled garden on the North Norfolk coast. Small enough that every booking matters, and distinctive enough that no two rooms should be sold the same way.
01Challenge
The problem worth solving
Small houses are usually sold through a rate grid: a room name, a thumbnail and a price. It is efficient, and it flattens everything that makes a place like this worth the drive. When a copper bath facing the sea and an attic room under a roof light arrive as two rows in a table, guests compare the only thing left to compare — the price.
Objectives
- 01Make each room persuasive on its own terms, not as a row in a table
- 02Carry the room a guest has chosen all the way into their booking
- 03Answer the small print before it becomes a reason to leave
- 04Stay fast on mobile, where coastal signal is rarely generous
02Strategy
The approach we took
We treated the Stay page as six product pages in one. Each room has its own name, its own line, an honest description, its key facts and a gallery — and then a booking link of its own, so the choice a guest has just made is never asked of them twice. What every stay includes is set out before the rooms rather than buried on a policy page, and the questions that quietly stall a booking — arrival, dogs, accessibility, minimum stays — are answered on the page, before the booking form.
03Design
How it looks, and why
Quiet, coastal and slow on purpose. An editorial serif carries the voice, set large and loose. The palette is taken from the place — chalk, flint, clay and a North Sea slate — and the heroes are short, slow films rather than slideshows: a curtain lifting in a sea-view room, the house at first light. The booking button stays in the header throughout, cream over the films and flint once you scroll, so the way to book is never more than a glance away.
Display
9664402416
Palette
- Flint#2A2724
- Chalk#F2EDE4
- Clay#9E5F3F
- Sea#1C2326
Grid — 12 col / 8px
04Development
How it was built
Hand-built static pages: no framework, no CMS and no hand-off to a third-party booking engine. Every room link opens the house’s own booking page with that room already selected. Motion runs on GSAP, and the hero films are muted, play inline and load nothing until they are needed, holding a still poster frame in the meantime. The Stay page paints its largest element in 1.5 seconds on a throttled connection, without a single layout shift.
Key features
- 01Six rooms, each with its own story, key facts and gallery
- 02Room-level booking links that arrive with the room already chosen
- 03What every stay includes, set out before the rooms
- 04Small print answered on the page: arrival, dogs, accessibility, minimum stays
- 05An availability check — dates and room — at the foot of the Stay page
- 06Slow, muted film heroes and a live local clock for a sense of place
05Results
What was built
A house with no guests has no bookings to report. What it has is the site itself: eight pages, six rooms that each make their own case, and a booking path that never loses the room a guest chose. Every figure below can be checked on the live site.
Concept project — The Saltmere House is fictional, but its website is live, and the figures below are measured from it rather than modelled. Performance was recorded on the Stay page over a throttled connection (4 Mbps, 70 ms latency) with a 4× CPU slowdown. Check them on the live site (opens in a new tab)
- 8 Pages designed and built
- 6 Rooms, each with its own route to booking
- 1.5s Largest contentful paint Stay page · throttled
- 0 Cumulative layout shift Stay page
Six rooms, none alike — and a site that sells every one of them on its own terms.
