Knattur

Context

An estate in Sueca, between market gardens and banana trees, running three businesses inside the same grounds: two rental apartments, open-air celebrations and wellness retreats. Three audiences with nothing in common — someone after a quiet break, someone planning a small wedding, someone organising a yoga retreat — and a single homepage for all three.

The brief also carried something a site this size rarely does: the booking had to close on the site, not over the phone.

Approach

• A homepage that routes rather than explains everything. The hero says where you are and what happens here; straight after it, three doors — stay, celebrate, retreat — each with its own path. Nobody has to read someone else’s business to reach their own.
• A booking engine built for this case rather than a generic plugin bent into shape: live calendar, rates that recalculate as duration and guest count change, and a firm hold secured with a 20% deposit through a secure gateway. The balance is settled at the end of the stay or event.
• A bespoke block theme on theme.json, no page builder. The owner edits content in the native editor and the design doesn’t come apart.
• Real photography of the estate instead of stock, with a high-contrast display face over a warm palette drawn from the house itself: terracotta, sage and cream.
• Three steps explained before booking. The process copy — choose, calculate, hold — sits on the homepage because a booking that takes money up front needs to be understood before it’s asked for.

What I built

• A hand-written WordPress block theme with its own patterns and templates
• A bespoke booking engine: availability, dynamic rates and deposit capture
• Content architecture for three business lines under one brand
• Design system in theme.json: palette, type scale and spacing
• Self-hosted woff2 typefaces, no third-party calls
• Technical SEO and published legal pages
• Consent banner

Outcome

Live since September 2026. What interests me most here isn’t the design: it’s that the site does real work. Availability used to be checked by message and dates held on a promise; now the calendar is public and a date is held with money. That’s the difference between a site that shows the estate and one that fills it.

A note on this work

Built at Xpandex, where I run the full cycle: design, development, performance, accessibility, technical SEO and deployment.