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Same coffee. Same roaster. One year apart.
The phone on the left is NOS Café's homepage as the Wayback Machine saved it on 18 Oct 2025. The one on the right is the Shopify store, live today.
What you can't see in a screenshot: their designer handed over a finished Framer design, and I ported it 1:1 to Liquid, with React only where something has to move. Then a box builder: up to five bags, grind and size per bag, and a discount that climbs from 10% to 20% as the box fills.
The part the team feels every week: 59 custom sections they edit without calling a developer.
What would you notice first as a shopper: the photography, the offer, or the box?
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Aetheria Haven — Designing an Immersive Luxury Hospitality & Reservation Experience
An editorial, high-end digital platform and booking ecosystem crafted for an exclusive cliffside boutique hotel and wellness retreat.
Project overview
Aetheria Haven was conceptualized and engineered to elevate digital hospitality branding, moving away from cluttered OTA (Online Travel Agency) templates toward an unhurried, opulent visual experience. Located along the Amalfi Coast, the 72-suite sanctuary required a digital interface that mirrored its physical ethos: serene, bespoke, and meticulously considered.
As the designer and developer, I built the entire web experience in Framer, integrating dynamic currency conversion, live suite modals, environmental estate metrics, and interactive reservation workflows.
The challenge
Luxury hospitality websites often struggle to balance heavy interactive utility such as booking engines, guest counters, and rate calculators with an airy, editorial atmosphere. The challenge was to design a light-mode aesthetic utilizing warm alabaster tones and champagne gold accents that felt exclusive and breathable, while packing high-density functional layers into every scroll.
Design & interactive features
The resulting platform combines cinematic media with subtle micro-interactions to create a frictionless user journey:
Cinematic Hero & Booking Engine: Features an immersive background video view paired with an integrated availability check bar supporting real-time date selectors, guest counts, and room type filtering.
Curated Suite Showcase: A 3-column interactive gallery highlighting exclusive accommodations—including the Executive Penthouse, Oceanfront Villa, and Garden Sanctuary—complete with detailed modal pop-ups displaying square footage, occupancy, and bespoke amenities like private plunge pools and butler service.
Estate Metrics & Bento Grid: High-density data modules showcasing live micro-climate indicators (Aetheria Cove temperature and local weather), Michelin accolades, and a 4:1 staff-to-guest ratio.
The VIP Secret Key (Interactive Surprise): An engagement-driven component placed near the footer. When tapped, it unlocks a glowing gold modal revealing an exclusive seasonal guest perk and reward code.
Global Currency Integration: A seamless multi-currency switcher in the floating header allowing instantaneous translation between USD, EUR, and GBP.
Shopify vs Framer: which one should you build on?
Clients ask me this almost every week. Here's my honest answer after building on both:
Choose Shopify if you're selling products.
Inventory, payments, shipping, taxes, reviews, subscriptions, TikTok Shop, Amazon: Shopify handles the hard parts of e-commerce out of the box. You can grow from 5 products to 5,000 without rebuilding.
Choose Framer if you're selling an idea, a service or yourself.
SaaS landing pages, agencies, portfolios, clinics, events. Framer gives you design freedom, smooth animations and fast pages, and your team can edit content without touching code.
The mistake I see most often:
Brands with 3 products and no plans to scale paying for a heavy Shopify setup, or service businesses forcing a store theme to look like a premium brand site. Pick the tool for the job, not the trend.
Can you use both?
Yes. A Framer site for the brand story and marketing pages, with Shopify handling checkout, is a great setup for premium DTC brands.
Quick rule:
🛒 Selling products → Shopify
✨ Selling a story, service or SaaS → Framer
Which one are you building on right now? 👇
#Shopify #Framer #WebDesign #Ecommerce #NoCode
The hybrid setup is where I'd add one caution: once checkout lives on a different domain than the brand story, attribution and cart persistence get messy fast, so it's worth planning that handoff before launch. In my experience the bigger deciding factor for food and CPG brands...