The brief
Palazzo Marzano is fourteen rooms in a 1712 palazzo on Ortigia, the island at the tip of Siracusa. Six rooms open onto the loggia from €260 a night; six sit above the roofline with the Ionian between two chimneys, from €340; two suites hold the corner of the first floor at €520. The old stables are the dining room: one barrel vault, twenty-four covers, four courses at €62, served at nine.
We wrote ourselves the brief an owner of a house like this might write in three sentences. Make it quiet. Round the buttons off. Keep it plain, because a guest comes for three things: the rooms, the table and a date.
The idea
Round the buttons off sinks most projects, because the easy answer is to make everything friendly, and a three-hundred-year-old palazzo is not friendly. It is calm, which is a different thing and a more expensive one. So the roundness is taken from the building: a courtyard with a house around it, two floors of loggia, twenty-two columns and an arch between every pair.
Every opening on the page is a real arch, cut as an SVG path rather than a border-radius: jambs, a springing line marked by two impost ticks, a keystone. The arch lays the page out: the loggia drawn as an elevation above the figure that claims its twenty-two columns, the rooms opening in an arch beside their rates, a walking scale that starts at a door. The page closes on the house's front at night, fourteen windows lit one after another, one per room.
The signature move
The first screen is the house, full-bleed: the courtyard at golden hour, then a sea room with its shutters open on the water, the roof terrace at sunset, and the long table laid under the arcade at night. Each holds six and a half seconds and the next comes in by a slow wipe from the left over the last, which stays whole beneath it, so no frame is ever empty or half dissolved. The name, the rate and the two buttons stand on a sill in shutter blue beneath the photographs, never on them: the sea room is white plaster edge to edge, and no one colour of type reads on all four without a tint heavy enough to spoil them. A small ink plate rises from the sill into the photograph's corner with a pause button and one small arch per place, the one on screen lit.
The scroll moment is one arch the height of the screen. The hour stands on the wall to its left at 144 pixels and its digits roll: 07:15 to 08:30 turns three figures and leaves the zero. The line stands on the right wall and changes behind a mask. Behind it stands the patch of sun its opening throws, the arch's own silhouette sheared by the hour: long and to the right in the morning, short at noon, long and amber by evening. Each photograph arrives by a wipe with a brass hairline riding the edge. At nine the night comes across in one hard edge, a lamp comes on beside the arch's foot, and the arch holds the courtyard from the first screen, lanterns lit.
The roundness comes from the architecture, not from informality. Formal and relaxed can share a room. Formal and loud cannot.
Why it converts
Most hotel sites open with a booking engine built for someone who has already decided. The visitor who is actually there is trying to picture herself somewhere, so the photographs make the argument and the price sits where she will pass it: €260 in the first screen's first sentence, then each rate beside its room, as the house would say it.
The ask is the desk's reply card, and it fits on one screen: 716 pixels from its title to its button at 1440, where an earlier version took 1,382. The three rooms are small arched plates in a radiogroup, each with its rate; on a phone they become a segmented row. The dates come from the house's own range calendar and sit on one row with the guests. The card prices the stay in two lines as it is filled in: the rate times the nights, breakfast shown as included, dinner at €62 a head, the total beside it. It enforces the two-night minimum in the house's own words: nobody unpacks in one. One verb runs from the first button to the last, "Ask about dates" to "Ask about these dates".
It sends nothing, and says so first. The success panel leads with the disclosure, then shows the reply the desk would have sent.
How it is built
Next.js, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind v4 and the case's own stylesheet; GSAP ScrollTrigger scrubs the day, Lenis smooths the scroll. The day's hold is a CSS sticky stage, never a GSAP pin, whose fixed-to-static flips measured a layout shift of 1.0. The reply card's arithmetic and its validation are pure functions with their own tests, and so is the slideshow: its order, its files and the rule that reduced motion keeps the courtyard still. Only the first photograph is preloaded; the other three are requested after the page has loaded, the show only moves to one that has arrived, and it stops off screen.
Every colour pair was computed. The day's surface is the shade of each hour and the patch is its sun, one step brighter, so the edge is hard and ink only gains contrast where it crosses the light. The words change on short timed eases rather than with the scroll, so no rest position leaves a digit sliced in its mask. The dining room's photograph stops at 62rem because its source is 1,536 pixels wide.
Ask for reduced motion and the page changes shape: the courtyard stands still with a play button, no Lenis, no ScrollTrigger, the day as six static bands, every drawing drawn. Without JavaScript the same bands appear, and all six hours are in the server-rendered page either way.
Palazzo Marzano is a fictional hotel. There is no palazzo on Via Marzano, no courtyard of twenty-two columns, and no room to enquire about. The form validates properly, then tells you it sent nothing. The building is a fiction; the build is not. It is a SharpHaw concept build: a complete, coded website for a company that does not exist, made to show the work rather than describe it. No real business, person or institution is named in it.
