Palma Alta: a hotel website that feels like arriving.

I set myself a brief: a website for a small, independent hotel inside a restored 1926 Mediterranean Revival house in Coral Gables.

The audience is travelers who choose a place for its character, not its amenities list. The site had two jobs: make someone feel the house before they arrive, and get them to check availability without the booking path feeling pushy.

Coral Gables is a city of arches. I made the arch the one bold element of the site and kept everything around it quiet.

The homepage opens on a single arched window, the way you'd see the courtyard from the loggia, with the name set large in a high-contrast serif that overlaps its base. Room images use the same arch, so the motif carries the brand through the page without needing decoration anywhere else.

The copy is written the way the owner would talk: short, specific, a little dry. "There's no lobby" says more about the experience than a paragraph of adjectives.

The palette comes straight from the place: banyan leaves and painted shutters for the greens, sunset on coral rock for the pinks, and a brass accent from the old iron gates. Dark green carries most of the page so the light sections feel like stepping into the courtyard.

Booking without breaking the mood

Hotel sites often either hide the booking button under the imagery or shout it everywhere. I kept one understated "Check availability" button in the header on desktop. On phones, where the header gets crowded, it moves into a slim bar at the bottom of the screen, within thumb reach, showing the starting price.

Pacing a long page

The homepage tells the story in the order a guest would experience it: the house, the rooms, the table, the neighborhood, then the invitation to stay. Each section alternates between dark and light so the scroll has a rhythm, like moving between shade and sun.

Designing mobile alongside desktop

The rooms sit in a staggered row on desktop and stack into a single column on phones, with the arch shape kept intact at every size. Text never runs wider than a comfortable reading line.

I built the site myself in hand-written HTML and CSS with no framework, so it loads fast and the live version matches the design exactly. It respects reduced-motion settings, has visible keyboard focus, and the only animation is a single reveal of the arch when the page opens.

If this were a real client, my next steps would be professional photography inside the arch frames, a full rooms page, and a connection to the hotel's booking engine.