The story of Fort Verandah

At No. 18 Light House Street, inside the walls of Galle Fort, there’s a small house with six rooms and its own bistro.

It was our first client. The brief was short: the website should feel like the place, calm and light, with old walls and sea air. And it should turn visitors into guests.

We didn’t pick colours from a chart. We looked at the Fort.

Walls washed in lime. Shutters painted deep green. Ochre plaster and teak doors. Most hotels reach for cream, but these walls are cooler and greyer, so the site is too.

Their crest is a doorway between two columns, and the Fort is full of arched doors.

So the doorway became the one bold shape on the site. Key pictures sit inside it, round at the top and square at the foot. Everything around it stays quiet.

Every room has its own page, so someone searching for that room can land right on it.

On a computer the rooms glide past as you scroll, like walking down a corridor. Tap one and its arched picture grows into the page. The pictures are the architect’s design renders, and they’re labelled that way until the photographs are taken.

The bistro has four menus, and every dish now shows up with its price.

Pick breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktails, and the dishes change in place. Same table, different course.

Every decision went into a style guide: each colour and where it came from, the type, the doorway, the spacing and how things move.

So the next person to touch this site, or the owner, can see why it looks the way it does.

Then we tried to break it. Slow connections, no connection, odd things typed into the forms.

We found seven problems and fixed all seven before showing anyone.