Luxury hospitality
The Carlin Hotel
A five-star Queenstown boutique hotel, where the site had to feel as considered as the suites and get guests to a reservation.
- Role
- Design & front-end build
- Year
- 2023
- Location
- Queenstown
The situation
The Carlin is a five-star boutique hotel in Queenstown. For a property at this level the website is part of the product — a guest paying premium rates forms their expectation of the room before they ever see it. The site had to carry that sense of restraint and quality, let the photography breathe, and still move a guest efficiently toward booking a suite.
What I did
- 01A photography-led design with generous space, so the property does the selling
- 02Suite pages that give each room type room to be understood, not just listed
- 03Reservations kept persistently reachable without cluttering the experience
- 04Typography and pacing tuned to feel unhurried and premium
- 05Built to hold up on the phones and tablets most travel research happens on
A closer look
The parts worth showing.
The rooms
Each suite gets a page, not a row in a table
At five-star rates a guest is choosing between three specific rooms, not booking 'a room'. Every suite has its own page with the space to be understood — what makes the Penthouse different from the Presidential is answered before the guest has to ask.
The rooms
Each suite gets a page, not a row in a table
At five-star rates a guest is choosing between three specific rooms, not booking 'a room'. Every suite has its own page with the space to be understood — what makes the Penthouse different from the Presidential is answered before the guest has to ask.
Photography
Full-bleed galleries that let the property sell itself
The interiors are the product. Each suite runs a full-bleed gallery with the interface pulled almost entirely out of the way, so the photography carries the weight and the guest forms their expectation of the room before any copy asks them to.
The wider stay
Dining and wellness framed as part of the stay
A boutique hotel competes on the whole experience, not the bed. Dining, wellness and Queenstown itself each get proper treatment, so the rate is set against a full stay rather than a room-night comparison on a booking aggregator.
On a phone
Where most of the traffic actually is.
How it went
From first conversation to live.
- 01
Discovery
The conversation started with what the property is competing against — not other Queenstown hotels so much as the guest's own expectation of what five-star should feel like. Anything that felt like a booking engine first and a hotel second would undercut the room rate before a guest reached it.
- 02
Look & feel
The design direction was deliberately quiet: generous whitespace, a restrained palette drawn from the interiors, and typography with enough air to feel unhurried. Almost every design decision here was a decision to remove something. The photography — suites, the fire, the lake — was treated as the main event and everything else got out of its way.
- 03
Build
Each suite got a proper page rather than a row in a table, so a guest can understand what distinguishes one room from another. Reservations sit persistently within reach without ever dominating, and the whole thing was built mobile-first since most travel research happens on a phone in the evening.
- 04
Launch
Launched ahead of the season with all suites, reservations and imagery in place.
- 05
Support
Hospitality sites move with the seasons — new photography, rate changes, package offers. Ongoing support keeps those current without the property needing to think about the technical side.
The result
A site that reads as five-star before a guest has seen a room, with booking always within reach.
Notable
- Photography-led, with restraint as the primary design device
- Individual suite pages rather than a single rooms list
- Persistent reservations route that never crowds the content
- Typography and pacing tuned for an unhurried read
- Mobile-first, because most travel research starts on a phone
Delivered through a New Zealand agency
Let's see what your website could be.
Tell me a bit about your business and I'll show you what's possible — no obligation.
Prefer email? sam@digitalhouse.nz