Lychnis Private Estates
A digital home for rare residences on the shores of Lake Ohrid, the slopes of Vodno and the quiet heights of Mavrovo. Designed and engineered from a blank page to feel the way a private estate feels: quiet, precise and unhurried.
- Role
- Design & development
- Scope
- Art direction, UX, UI, web development, motion
- Stack
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GSAP, Lenis
- Type
- Cormorant Garamond & Manrope
The hero cycles through four Macedonian landscapes. The search sits in the first screen, because buyers arrive with intent.
The brief
Luxury that whispers.
Most real-estate websites look like listing portals: filters, grids, prices, noise. Homes at the top of the market are not sold that way. They change hands quietly, through trust, reputation and the feeling of a place.
The goal was a website that behaves like a private office rather than a marketplace: one that tells the story of Macedonia's most beautiful landscapes, and makes a buyer in Zurich or Vienna feel already welcome by the lake.
Goals
- Feel like a private office, not a portal
- Lead with place and story, not price
- Keep search one tap away for buyers with intent
- Perform beautifully on every device
The whole journey in one scroll: introduction, selected residences, seven regions, the private office, testimonials and a single, calm call to action.
Art direction
Where light meets stone.
Ohrid's ancient name was Lychnidos, the city of light. That one line became the whole concept: warm light, old stone, still water. A palette of ink, bone and brass replaces the usual luxury cliché of black and gold.
Cormorant Garamond carries the voice: high-contrast, literary and calm, set large with italic accents. Manrope keeps the interface precise and modern. Motion is slow on purpose: long eases, soft reveals and nothing that shouts.
Color
Ink, bone & brass
Typography
A literary voice, a precise interface
Where light meets stone.
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Rare residences, represented with discretion.
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Selected residences: a pinned horizontal gallery that turns browsing into a slow walk through each home.
Story before stock: the house's origin, then seven regions, each with its own character, before a single price is shown.
A full-bleed pause: one quote, one view.
The Private Office: five services in an accordion that keeps a long offer calm and scannable.
Designed for the phone as carefully as the desktop: the same story, re-composed for one thumb.
Engineering
Built by the hands that drew it.
Hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no page builder and no template. GSAP and ScrollTrigger orchestrate the reveals and the pinned gallery; Lenis gives the scroll its weight.
Every interaction degrades gracefully. Motion respects reduced-motion preferences, images load lazily below the fold, and the markup stays semantic and accessible.
Under the hood
- Semantic, accessible markup
- GSAP + ScrollTrigger choreography
- Lenis smooth scrolling
- Reduced-motion fallbacks
- Lazy-loaded imagery
- Fluid, responsive type scale
One invitation, not ten buttons: “Begin a private conversation.”