Antique Woods Website and OS Development

Role: Web design, development, product design Stack: Next.js, built with Claude as my development partner Live: antiquewoodsla.com

- Winston Alder

Antique Woods sources, mills and finishes reclaimed and new growth timber for residences and lodges across North America and Europe. Trusses, beams, flooring, stairs, millwork, whole timber frames. The work is extraordinary. The old site didn't show it, and every enquiry landed in an inbox where it was easy to lose.

They needed two things: a site that sells to architects and designers, and a way to run the business behind it.

I designed and built the site around the material. Photography carries every page, the type is set in a licensed display face, and every product line reads the way their printed catalogue does, down to the ink line drawings of ten truss configurations.

The part I'm proudest of is the product configurator. The mill already codes every material by collection, species, cut, texture and pattern. I turned that system into an interactive builder, so an architect can assemble a specification like 01-AWO-RQ08-SD00 and request the data sheet in one step.

Beyond that:

Paid landing pages for every product line, each with a quote form built from that product's own specification questions

Spam protection on every form that a real visitor never notices

A timed launch: the site sat behind a countdown and opened itself at midnight, with search indexing switching on at the same moment

The bigger build was the one visitors never see. I designed and developed a private back office for the team:

Every form on the site flows straight into a pipeline of leads and clients, and the same person writing in twice stays one record

Proposals are written in the OS and opened by the client on their own page

A live analytics dashboard sits alongside the pipeline

And a website review desk. The team opens the live site inside the OS and pins comments to the exact element they mean, with screenshots and threaded replies. They can also run taste tests: mark a section, build alternate versions, and vote on them in place, without touching the live site. Those same pins now brief my AI coding agent directly, so feedback moves from comment to shipped fix without anyone re-explaining it.

I designed on figma, and then I built everything in Next.js with Claude as my development partner. That let a single designer ship at the pace of a small team, while I held the design decisions and the quality bar. The client reviewed work in the same OS they now run the business on.