Atlas House
A discreet British lifestyle management company with a hand-coded one-page site. The brief was two ideas that pull against each other: simple but big, quiet but loud. We rebuilt it in a day, with no downtime.
Generated in code.
The sea, sky and grain are a GLSL shader, not a photograph. About four kilobytes, sharp at any size. It runs on desktop, where the pointer can push a swell through the water.
Simple but big. Quiet but loud.
Atlas House works almost entirely by introduction, for people who do not lack for options. The site had to feel expensive without ever raising its voice, because in this sector loud reads as cheap.
There was a harder constraint underneath it. A company whose entire product is discretion cannot show its clients, its vessels or its destinations. Every obvious luxury photograph was unavailable to us.
The answer was a chart room.
A yacht's chart room is where the whole voyage is planned, in private, out of sight of the guests. Nobody on board ever sees it. That is precisely what this company is, and it gave the site a spine that could not be reused anywhere else.
A brand system, not a colour scheme
Deep navy against a single brass accent, used at roughly five per cent of the surface and never as a fill, only as light. One accent takes discipline. It is also what stops a dark site looking like every other dark site.
A hero generated in code, not photographed
The sea, sky, horizon glow and film grain are a GLSL fragment shader written for this build. No image, no video, nothing to download. It renders sharp at any screen size and the pointer pushes a slow swell through the water.
Details that belong to this business only
The cursor is a brass surveyor's crosshair trailing a live latitude and longitude readout. On a company that coordinates travel, it is the right detail rather than a clever one.
The unglamorous half
A privacy notice where there had been none, structured data, proper heading order, alt text, a document language, and every old anchor link preserved so nothing shared by email ever breaks.
A cursor that reads as a position fix.
A brass hairline crosshair trailing a live latitude and longitude that updates as you move. For a company whose whole business is knowing exactly where you are and where you are going next, it is the right detail rather than a clever one.
It never exists on a phone. The whole effect sits behind a fine-pointer media query, so touch visitors are not charged a single byte for something they can never use. That applies to this page too.
The old site was not broken.
It was a competent hand-coded page with good copy, most of which we kept because it was better than anything we would have written cold. What it could not do was rank, reassure, or hold anyone's attention. Drag the handle.
Accessibility, best practices and SEO: 100 across the board.
On mobile and desktop, with a WebGL hero, four art-directed plates, a bespoke cursor and a full motion system running. Perfect scores on three of the four are the part most builds never reach.
The site we replaced scored well too, and we will say so: hand-written code doing very little is close to unbeatable on raw speed. Anyone can win a benchmark by shipping nothing. Desktop performance came back at 95 and mobile at 85, which is what a generated hero costs on a throttled handset. The shader renders below native resolution, caps at thirty frames, pauses off-screen and never runs on a phone at all. We publish both figures because a studio that only shows you its desktop column is telling you something.
Google Lighthouse, 31 July 2026.
Same day, no downtime.
Brief to live inside a single working day. The old site served every visitor right up to the moment the domain moved, and the new one took over without a gap.
Every anchor link from the old page was carried across, so any link ever shared in an email still lands exactly where it was meant to.
Visit the live siteGot a site that works but does not sell?
Most of the sites we rebuild are not broken. They are just quieter than the business deserves.