Built in 2024, rebuilt from the ground up in 2026
Visit the live siteA barefoot-luxe hotel on Kabalana Beach, Sri Lanka. I built the original site in 2024, then two years later tore the design down and rebuilt it — same property, same booking engine, an entirely different experience.
- Year
- 2024 — 2026
- Role
- Creative direction · UX · Front-end
- Discipline
- Hotel website · Build & redesign
The 2024 site did its job. By 2026 the brief had changed: the navigation was tired, the inner pages felt templated, and the client wanted the whole thing to carry the weight of the property rather than describe it. The instruction was blunt — it should look nothing like the old site.
I kept exactly one thing from the old build: the content structure, what each page needs to say. Everything else was rewritten. New copy, new page order, an editorial layout built on whitespace and restraint instead of stacked widgets.
The motion is written by hand — GSAP, ScrollTrigger and Lenis in a WordPress child theme — rather than dropped in from page-builder presets. That distinction is the whole redesign: default animation is what makes a site look templated, and no amount of new photography fixes it.
The constraint that shaped everything: the booking engine had to keep taking reservations throughout. The property never stopped selling rooms, so the rebuild ran on staging and went live in one move.