Luxury Atelier Website & Custom CMS

Scope: Web, UX Design, Design System Implementation, Full-Stack Development, Custom CMS, Deployment

Opus Ornato is a Brazilian atelier making botanical and bijou ornaments — bridal bouquets, arrangements and table pieces, each made by hand for a single wedding.

They did not need a shop. Nothing here is bought off a shelf, and a cart would have made the wrong promise. What they needed was a site that takes a bride's vague idea of what she wants and turns it into a briefing the atelier can actually quote, while building enough confidence along the way that she starts one.

The second requirement mattered just as much. The founder is not technical, and she had to be able to run the entire site herself, in Portuguese, without calling a developer.

A guided personalisation journey, not a checkout. Six steps with conditional branching, so the questions change based on what she has already answered. At the end a single briefing goes to the studio for a hand-quoted response. No cart, no card, and no false suggestion that a bespoke piece has a shelf price.

Collections built to be browsed slowly. Bouquets and arrangements each get their own index, filterable by category and by moment. Piece pages lead with a single photograph, then a specification sheet: material, dimensions, handle, lead time, care. Specification, no adjectives.

A design system ported properly. Around 35 components were rebuilt as a pure presentational layer with no data fetching, sitting on design tokens kept as CSS custom properties. Design and data stay separate, so the site can be restyled or re-sourced later without the two fighting each other.

A custom CMS, not a monthly subscription. Payload is open source, so there is no licence fee, no per-seat charge and no platform bill that grows as the catalogue does. The only running cost is hosting. And because it was configured for this business rather than bought off the shelf, the admin speaks her vocabulary — peças, bouquets, arranjos, the moment a piece is made for — instead of generic posts and products she would have to translate in her head. The content and the code are hers to keep.

The admin runs in Portuguese. Not English labels with a translation layer over them. The CMS is natively in her language, with every field description written for someone who has never used a CMS before.

She sees the page as she types. Live preview sits beside the form at the site's own breakpoints, phone, tablet and desktop, so she is checking the real layout rather than guessing at it.

Nothing publishes by accident. Every edit stays a draft until she presses publish, and version history keeps the previous copy. A bad edit is undone by restoring it, not by remembering what it used to say.

The site protects her from mistakes. A photograph that is in use cannot be deleted, and she is told how many pieces it appears on. Filenames arriving straight from WhatsApp are cleaned automatically. Page addresses are generated once and stay stable when a piece is renamed, so existing links never break.

SEO that works without a marketer. Titles, descriptions, sitemap and structured data are all generated from the fields she already fills in, so a newly published piece is marked up correctly without anyone remembering to do it. She can still override the Google snippet per page, with a live preview and character counts.

Nine surfaces: home, two collection indexes, piece pages, the six-step journey, confirmation, process, about and help

All copy authored in Brazilian Portuguese

Images served as AVIF and WebP at the exact size each screen needs, through Cloudflare's CDN

Required alt text plus focal point and crop control on every image, so one photograph works across all three crops the design allows

Database schema managed by reviewable migrations rather than automatic sync, so every change is proven locally before it reaches production

End-to-end and integration test suites

Search engines optimization built-in to support the admin

Next.js 16 · Payload CMS 3 · PostgreSQL · Cloudflare R2 · Railway

Built and deployed, currently pre-launch. The photography here is the atelier's own; the full commissioned shoot is still to come.