Building a Website for Luxury Interior Designers, Project One
How We Created An Understated, Custom Website From Scratch For Project One
Global Bay built a custom, high-performance website from scratch for Project One – luxury interior designers based in Cardiff and Bristol.
Impact
Project One is one of our most rewarding projects. Since the launch of the new website, Project One has seen a remarkable increase in organic traffic and user engagement and an uplift in its qualified enquiries, thus supporting Dorian’s ambition to grow the brand across Cardiff, Bristol, and beyond.
Services
- Website Design & Development
- Custom CMS Build
- Performance & Speed Optimisation
- Image Optimisation
- Search Engine Optimisation
Background
Project One takes the spotlight with its tagline, “Smile to Sleep. Wake to Wonder,” guiding visitors through the what and how of its services. Founded by Dorian, Project One is an award-winning design and build collective that specialises in high-end residential refurbishments and new developments.
The brand is rooted in Cardiff, Bristol, and Monmouth, but the team has experience from working on prestigious, high-end projects around the world.
Before partnering with Global Bay, Project One had spent 16 years with frustrating website iterations. As Dorian revealed, “This certainly wasn’t our first rodeo. Over the past 16 years, we’ve had a new website built roughly every three years, and if we’re honest, none of them ever quite delivered what we had hoped for.”
That pattern — a new site every three years, each one either an empty shell or a pretty one with no strategy behind it — was why Dorian went looking for a luxury agency with genuine expertise in designing websites for discerning businesses rather than a general design agency. A recommendation from a colleague in the SEO industry pointed him to us.
“We’ve experienced everything from expensive, largely unpopulated templates that we then had to spend huge amounts of time filling ourselves, through to beautifully designed websites that looked great but had virtually no SEO or commercial strategy behind them”, he said.
When we heard of the project, our first suggestion was to inject those international credentials into their website so that the message was convincing for the local UK luxury market as well.
The projects cover bespoke kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, extensions, and full-scale refurbishments. Project One is accredited by the FMB and SBID, and its portfolio is an impressive showcase of multi-million-pound residential projects.
Our immediate goal was to create a website which correlates with a higher perceived price point. It was important that prospective clients could browse past projects easily. For a company of this calibre, that website had to have its strategies and objectives aligned with the beautiful design.
The Challenge
Based on the discovery phase, we determined that Project One must have a compelling story to justify its positioning at the high end of the luxury market. Besides reflecting the premium nature of their work, the website was also to support long-term growth across their three locations.
With an in-depth questionnaire, we discovered that Project One already had a strong reputation through word of mouth and industry recognition. As Dorian said, and we quote, “This time, we decided to approach things very differently. We carried out a huge amount of research because we wanted to find a company that could genuinely understand our business and translate the architectural style and attention to detail of our design work into a website. We also wanted somebody prepared to work meticulously with us on every aspect of it — the structure, the wording, the photography, the user journey and all of the small details that ultimately make the difference.
Jon came highly recommended through a work colleague in the SEO industry, so we already felt comfortable taking the first step.
From the very first meeting and initial briefing, we had the feeling that Jon and the team genuinely understood what we were trying to achieve. That continued throughout the carefully planned preliminary stages, into the bespoke design and development, and finally through the detailed snagging and refinement at the end.”
But their existing website was built on Squarespace. Project One only had to offer a high-level message and nothing more. A Squarespace template cannot justify the significance of a company that has worked on some of the most exclusive projects in the world. The platform didn’t have the capacity for the level of customisation and credibility we wanted to build.
Hence, the single biggest problem was proving this credibility on a website. Our ICP was a customer with a £500k+ renovation budget. We had to create a halo effect with an attractive website and ensure that the user experience was as top-notch as the product quality.
The project began with five key challenges:
- Design a website that could remain relevant for years.
- Meet revenue goals through stronger organic search visibility and a content strategy.
- Have attractive and original photography.
- Develop an interface and user experience that shouldn't look like it could belong to another interior designer’s site.
- Build a fast website that performed well in search results and encouraged visitors to become clients.
The Project
A good rule of thumb when building a site entirely from scratch is to make the site as flexible, secure, and scalable as possible, so that there can be customisations later on, too. Templates and off-the-shelf themes tend to be credibility destroyers. When done poorly, they make a luxury brand’s website look cheap.
The entire website was custom-designed and built using Global Bay’s established tech stack. Our tech stack is a robust and well-maintained foundation upon which we create premium and sustainable websites, without any bottlenecks.
Jon closely collaborated with Dorian through every stage. “What impressed us most was that they didn’t simply build what we asked for. They constantly came back with original ideas, creative solutions and ways of improving the site that we simply wouldn’t have thought of ourselves”, Dorian noted.
The project took around three months from start to launch, which is our standard build time for a luxury web project of this scope.
We implemented three levels of performance optimisation.
- Server-level object caching (Redis) to keep the site fast under load,
- Full page-speed optimisation (LiteSpeed),
- And image processing that converts every photograph to a lighter modern format (WebP) with no visible loss in quality.
Our team is brilliant at website optimisation. Whilst our design and development team took the reins during the site build, we guaranteed a certain site speed (90+ on Google PageSpeed Insights) thanks to our technical team. The website now carries gallery-quality images of multi-million-pound projects but still loads within 2 seconds.
According to a luxury commerce survey, 63% of wealthy consumers now make purchases on mobile. 72% stated there is no upper spending limit on mobile transactions. We saw a massive digital opportunity for luxury brands here.
To meet this opportunity, we engineered custom breakpoints for mobile responsiveness to make sure the website adapts to mobile, tablet, and desktop. This made it easier for consumers to browse high-end portfolio of Project One on small screens. A slide-out menu was a cleaner alternative to the standard header menu, giving full control over how the nav feels on smaller screens.
Instead of creating comparison pricing charts, the website of Project One has dedicated all its calls to action to contacting the team and making an enquiry, as every home refurbishment project is different.
The Outcome
Project One now has a website that the team always wanted. Dorian was closely involved throughout the process, guiding most of the front-end aspects, such as the page structure and the language used across the site. He wanted us to make some adaptations here and other changes there, and appreciated that our “flexibility, patience and creativity never disappeared.”
“The response since launching has been exceptional”, he said. “Feedback from people within our industry has been first-class, and remarkably, we even receive emails from people who may never become clients simply to tell us how much they like the website.”
After 16 years of trying to get our website right, it finally feels as though we have a site that properly represents who we are, the quality of our work and the level of detail we put into every project.”
Here are some of the targets that Global Bay helped Dorian achieve;
- The new website is fast, beautiful, and built for long-term growth.
- The organic traffic increased by 16%.
- The brand is now positioned, digitally, as a premium, award-winning design and build collective.
- 25% increase in user engagement.
- The website is structured as a stunning portfolio for the projects Skyfall, Ninian, Chestnut House and others, displaying the budget, location, year, and photography.
- A 42% increase in page views.
- Even with the high-quality images, the website loads without the layout breaking down.
- Service pages are optimised for search engines and built to rank.
Understanding case studies brings you one step closer to hiring the right luxury digital agency for your brand.
We can engineer a similar transformation for your upcoming launch or redesign. If you are ready to discuss it, book a strategy session with our director. While the luxury digital market is in a state of flux, our branding consultants and web designers are in the thick of it with your team from day one.
If you are interested in reading more about our work, you have full access to our previous case studies on our website.