A self-initiated website for Stele, an invented residential developer in Portland. Custom design and build: 10 pages, written in English (US).

Stele is an invented design-and-build developer in Portland, Oregon. It buys difficult land (steep slopes, dense forest, the edge of an inlet), commissions the architecture, builds and sells a few houses a year.

The reader is a buyer or a landowner who has to trust the company with a site most builders would turn down. The site has to show the work the way the company sees it: land, material and time.

A home page that opens on slow drone footage of a house in the forest.

A horizontal gallery of six projects that holds the screen while you scroll, with a counter and a progress bar.

A page for each project: an opening image that zooms with the scroll, a spec sheet (lot in acres, square feet, bedrooms, status, and the price when it is for sale), text about the land, and a floor plan that draws itself.

A studio page on how the company works, from buying the land to handing over the keys, and a contact page.

An inquiry form on the projects that are for sale.

A light, high-contrast serif for headlines, wide-tracked capitals for labels, near-black pages and square corners everywhere, so the photography carries the page.

The tone is about land, material and time, never “luxury”. US formats throughout: dollars, square feet and acres.

Houses and buildings are hard to sell from a grid of thumbnails. A good site gives each project room: the land, the plan, the numbers and the photographs. I design and build those sites from scratch, so the projects carry the page instead of a template.