Accommodation · tourism
Lake Hayes
Luxury lakefront accommodation with two distinct offerings — lodge and cottages — separated cleanly so guests book the right one.
- Role
- Design & front-end build
- Year
- 2023
- Location
- Queenstown
The situation
Lake Hayes offers luxury lakefront accommodation near Queenstown across two quite different products: the lodge and the cottages. The site needed to present both without confusing guests about which they were looking at, while doing justice to one of the best outlooks in the country.
What I did
- 01A clear split between lodge and cottages, established immediately in the navigation
- 02Full-bleed landscape photography treated as the main event
- 03A persistent Book Now route that follows the guest through the site
- 04A restrained palette and type treatment that stays out of the scenery's way
- 05Mobile-first layouts for guests researching a trip on their phone
A closer look
The parts worth showing.
Two properties
A lodge and cottages, kept distinct
The estate offers two genuinely different stays. Rather than flattening them into one accommodation page, each gets its own treatment, so a couple booking a cottage and a group booking the lodge both land somewhere that was written for them.
Two properties
A lodge and cottages, kept distinct
The estate offers two genuinely different stays. Rather than flattening them into one accommodation page, each gets its own treatment, so a couple booking a cottage and a group booking the lodge both land somewhere that was written for them.
Detail
Rooms shown at the scale the setting deserves
Central Otago is the reason people come. The cottage pages give the landscape and interiors full width rather than boxing them into thumbnails, which is what carries a booking decision made from the other side of the world.
Destination content
An itinerary built into the site
Wineries, activities, dining and relaxation each get their own guide. It positions the estate as a base for the region rather than just a bed, and gives a guest planning a trip a reason to stay on the site instead of leaving to research elsewhere.
On a phone
Where most of the traffic actually is.
How it went
From first conversation to live.
- 01
Discovery
The core risk was confusion. A guest who books a cottage expecting the lodge — or the reverse — is a bad review waiting to happen. So the first structural decision was that the split had to happen immediately, in the navigation, before a guest invests any time going down the wrong path.
- 02
Look & feel
When your property looks out over Lake Hayes, the design job is mostly restraint. We built the direction around full-bleed landscape photography, with a palette pulled from the setting itself — greys, tussock, water — and typography quiet enough to stay out of the view.
- 03
Build
Lodge and cottages were built as parallel branches rather than sections of one page, each with its own imagery and detail, while a persistent Book Now follows the guest throughout. Layouts were built mobile-first, since most of this research happens on a phone.
- 04
Launch
Launched with both offerings live and photography optimised so the large landscape imagery still loads quickly.
- 05
Support
Seasonal imagery and rate updates handled as they come up.
The result
Two offerings presented distinctly on one site, with the setting doing the persuading.
Notable
- Two distinct products separated at the top level of navigation
- Full-bleed landscape photography as the primary persuasion
- Persistent Book Now that follows the guest
- Palette drawn from the landscape rather than imposed on it
- Mobile-first for evening trip research
Delivered through a New Zealand agency
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