Whitmore & Finch

Whitmore & Finch is a partnership of six on Mount Street, Mayfair, founded in 1891 and never sold. It works in six postcodes, Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea, Holland Park, Kensington and Hampstead, and has sold 848 houses and flats worth £3.4bn since 2015. Seven in ten were agreed before a listing existed, offered by letter to a few of the 412 buyers on its register.

The families who sell through a firm like this want discretion and the families who buy want access, and neither of them wants a search grid. The site has to feel like the firm: old, certain, precise about the houses and quiet about itself.

Old money, set as a letterhead. The header is a centred wordmark with Established 1891 in spaced capitals beneath it, the sections to its left and the telephone and a valuation button to its right. The page is stucco white, railing-black ink and Hague blue, with claret as the house colour and gilt only on the dark bands. Newsreader sets the display type at optical size, with Instrument Sans beneath it.

The hero is a single photograph, full bleed: a Belgravia terrace at blue hour, porch lit, chandeliers on in the first-floor windows. The terrace fills the lower half and the claim is centred in the empty sky above it, so there is no scrim or tint and the headline stops at 58 pixels. On a portrait screen the headline stays in the sky and the standfirst drops to a solid band beneath the photograph. A paper plate in the corner names the house the page is about to walk through, with its guide price.

Room by room. The section holds under the header while scroll walks six rooms of one Chester Square house in viewing order: hall, dining room, drawing room, library, principal bedroom, and back down to the kitchen and garden. The photograph wipes up when the walk climbs a floor, down when it descends and sideways when it stays on the floor. Beside it the house is drawn in section, street on the left, garden on the right, four storeys and the stair, and the room on screen fills in gilt.

Under the drawing each room is a line in a list: its number, its name, its floor. Below that are its dimensions in feet and inches with metres beside them, as British particulars print them, and one sentence a buyer would ask about. The list is also a way to jump to a room. Scroll only chooses the room and nothing is scrubbed, so wherever the reader stops, the screen is a finished composition.

The page never offers a search. It walks you through a house.

Agency sites in this bracket are portals with a crest. This one argues for private sale in the firm's own figures and steps. The Private Office is three steps under hairlines: a partner values the house in person, eight to twelve registered buyers hear about it by letter, and viewings are by appointment, with no board and no photographs online. The neighbourhoods are an index of what each postcode's houses are, what they fetch per square foot and how many the firm has sold there.

Every action leads to one form. Valuation buttons open it for a seller, who is asked for the address and a timeframe. Each of the six houses for sale, and each neighbourhood, opens it for a buyer with that house or area already filled in. A seller's quote and the firm's four dates, from 1891 to today, sit just before the form. There is no mailto: the address is printed, and the form is how the page asks to be written to.

Coded, not mocked, in React and CSS, with no animation library. The walk is CSS sticky over six empty steps, 70svh each. An IntersectionObserver on a line across the middle of the screen picks the room, and CSS clip-path keyframes do the wipes, choosing the direction by comparing floors in a small tested function. A one-line inline script marks the section before paint, so the walk's height exists before a deep link lands; below 1024px, and without JavaScript, the rooms are a plain list with a small copy of the drawing each. The hero's entrance is CSS alone and reduced motion gets it still.

All sixteen photographs were made with GPT Image 2, prompted as Country Life editorial: natural light, verticals corrected, lived-in antiques, no lettering except the gilt on the firm's own shopfront. The facts are kept in one file, with tests that check the arithmetic a buyer would do: the neighbourhood tallies sum to the firm's total, every room fits inside the house's square footage, and the feet-to-metres conversions are right.