A Web Wise North Premium-tier build · demonstration
Halse Architects.
A fictional small practice in the North of England, working slowly on residential and small commercial projects. Halse isn't a real firm — it's our proof of what Premium looks like when the brief is creative portfolio. The kind of site architects, designers and studios ask us to build when they want it to feel calm. See it live at /showcase/halse.
The brief.
A small architecture practice — one principal, a handful of live projects — needs a website that positions them against national names (Studio Bark, Niall McLaughlin, Assemble) without pretending to their scale. It has to feel unhurried, typographically confident, and let the work carry the weight. It has to be a place clients-of-good-taste feel at home.
Design decisions.
- Typography — Playfair Display for project names and quiet headlines, Inter for everything else. Tight tracking, generous line-height, no uppercase noise.
- Palette — parchment (#f4f1ec) paper, ink body, terracotta accent (#a0522d). The accent appears three times on the whole site — that's the point.
- Imagery — building photography with shadow and weather. No Photoshop sky-replace. Fewer, larger, held longer.
- Layout — an underlying asymmetric grid; project tiles don't all start at the same baseline. Deliberate, not broken.
- Motion — effectively none. An architect's portfolio that auto-scrolls is not an architect's portfolio.
What we built.
- 4 pages — home, projects, practice, enquire
- Projects index — full-bleed hero imagery, short descriptors, typographic hierarchy that reads like an editorial
- Practice page — essay-length copy about how they work, plus principal bio and values laid out like a manifesto, not a list
- Enquire page — a considered form (project type, site, budget band, timescale) — not a five-line "get in touch"
- Schema markup — Organization + ProfessionalService, so the practice shows cleanly in search
What this would cost in real life.
A real Halse engagement sits inside the Premium tier at £4,500, 4 weeks end to end. Architect portfolios are one of the sharper use-cases for this tier — the design restraint matters, and the copy-quality signal matters even more. If individual project case studies run long (many shots, long write-ups), we scope those per-project as add-ons.
Stats.
Browse the live build: /showcase/halse. Every page is real.