Tessel’s buildings are precise, patient and full of light. Their old website was none of those things. We rebuilt it around the photography and the plans — and then got out of the way.
The brief
The practice had more than sixty completed projects and no consistent way of presenting them. Prospective clients struggled to find relevant work, and the team avoided updating the site because it took a developer to do it.
They wanted a site that felt like their printed monographs, loaded instantly on a building site’s patchy signal, and could be updated by anyone in the studio in minutes.
Approach
Every project follows the same rhythm: a single hero image, a short statement, the plans, then a sequence of photographs at their natural proportions. A filterable index lets visitors sort by typology, place or year in one tap.
Craft
Images are served at exactly the size each screen needs, and the whole home page weighs less than a single uncompressed photograph. The type is set in a single grotesk at three sizes; hairline rules do the rest.
We update the site ourselves every week now. It finally looks like the work.
Kari Solheim, Partner
Outcome
Since launch, enquiries through the site have doubled and the practice has used it as the backbone of two competition submissions. The studio publishes new projects themselves, usually on the day photographs arrive.
- Enquiries through the website doubled within a year
- Home page loads in under one second on 4G
- Accessibility audited to WCAG 2.2 AA