A 14-room inn that wanted a website as deliberate as the place itself.
The brief we wrote for ourselves: a fourteen-room inn with no front desk after nine needs a site that can take a booking while the innkeeper sleeps. The usual pattern — a photo carousel, a third-party booking widget, a PDF menu — is everything the place isn’t. So the site has three quiet jobs: show the rooms, answer the questions the phone usually gets, and make booking feel like writing a letter, not filling out a form.
- Site
- cedarbrookinn.com
- Industry
- Hospitality
- Location
- Phoenicia, NY
- Palette
- Pages
- 6 pages
- Scope
- Studio — $249/mo
- Build range
- 5–10 days — kickoff to launch
- In the build
- Booking-inquiry flow written in full sentences
- Photo curation — 80 originals down to 23
- Room cards with public rates
A concept build — the business is fictional, the craft is not. Scope and build range are quoted from our plans, the same way we’d quote yours.
How it came together.
Slow it down
No carousels, no popups, no cookie banners shouting. Pages that feel like the inn — quiet, layered, generous with whitespace.
Photography first
We curated 80 of the owner’s phone photos down to 23. Each room got one hero shot. The site is mostly photo.
Reservations that read like a letter
The booking flow uses real sentences. “When would you like to arrive?” feels different from a date picker.
Every page has a job.
The sheet index — what we’d walk you through, page by page, on the review call.
Home
One photograph, one line about the valley, and the booking bar. A visitor who already knows the inn can be holding dates in seconds — one who doesn’t gets walked gently down to the rooms.
Rooms
Each room type gets a hero shot, a public rate, and a short paragraph about light and quiet — no thumbnail grids, no amenity icon soup.
Dining
Breakfast hours, the Saturday supper, and where the eggs come from. This page exists to answer the questions guests call about most.
Gather
Small gatherings — rehearsal dinners, retreats, long-table birthdays — with capacity facts and an honest note about what the inn doesn’t host.
Visit
Directions that admit the last mile is gravel, what each season is like, and what to pack. The concierge, written down.
Book a stay
The booking flow in full sentences — “When would you like to arrive?” — with rates shown before anyone commits to anything.
Why a booking bar in the header
An inn’s site has exactly one job that pays for the rest. The bar rides the header on every page, so “can we come Friday?” is never more than one tap from an answer — and no popup ever asks first.
Why no carousel
A carousel is a way of not choosing. We chose — one photograph per room, the best of the eighty — so every image gets looked at instead of waited through.
Why the rates are public
Hidden prices send people to the booking platforms to find them — and the platforms keep the margin. Rates sit right on the room cards, so the booking stays direct.
The other artboards.
Want one of your own?
We’d build yours with the same care. Studio scope is $249/month — live in 5–10 days.