CONCEPT STUDY. The Quarry House is a fictional business I created to demonstrate my process on a real-world problem. The research, design, and build are 100% real. The company isn’t. No results are claimed; judge the thinking.
The Quarry House: helping an eight-room inn win back its direct bookings
Helping an eight-room inn escape the 18% OTA commission trap.
The client
A fictional boutique inn in a converted stone quarry building: eight individually designed rooms, a devoted repeat clientele, and 70% of bookings arriving through Booking.com, each one minus an 18% commission.
The problem
The inn’s website was a brochure PDF wearing a URL. Guests would discover the inn on an OTA, visit the site to check it out, find nothing the OTA didn’t show better, and book through the OTA. The site had one honest purpose: capture the direct booking at that decisive moment. It wasn’t even trying.
The one job
Convert OTA window-shoppers into direct bookings.
Design decisions
Photography-led, interface-quiet. Full-bleed imagery, generous whitespace, restrained type. The design’s job is to make you feel the stay, then get out of the way. (This is where “minimal” earns its keep.)
A “book direct” value proposition, stated plainly: best-rate promise, welcome drink, flexible checkout. Guests need a reason to leave the OTA; politeness isn’t one.
Every room is a landing page. Rooms as a CMS collection with their own photography, story, and availability CTA, because guests fall in love with a room, not a property.
A persistent, unobtrusive “Check availability” button: present at every scroll position without ever covering the photography.
An “Around the Quarry” section: trails, restaurants, seasons. It answers the guest’s real question (“what will my weekend feel like?”) and builds search relevance the OTAs can’t.
Performance despite heavy imagery: responsive image sets, lazy loading, careful font loading. An immersive site that still loads on hotel-lobby wifi.
The build
Webflow CMS for rooms and local guides; integration point for a booking engine with the handoff styled to feel seamless; Open Graph tuning so shared links look as good as the site.
What I’d measure
Direct-vs-OTA booking share (the number that pays for the site many times over), availability-check clicks, room-page depth, and booking-engine handoff completion.
What this means for your business
Inns, restaurants, venues, wineries: anywhere the feel of the place is the product, this is how I’d sell it. Tell me about your project.