Gilmerton House Website Redesign

Gilmerton House is a luxury, exclusive use Georgian Mansion in East Lothian. Unfortunately their online offering fell way short of the quality that they provide to the guests at their amazing property They approached Flintriver with a single aim…elevate their standing online above their competitors.

I was responsible for:

  • Wireframing/prototyping
  • Front end design
  • Front end build
Gilmerton House exterior Gilmerton House...impressive, isn't it?

Getting started

After a series of kick off meetings, we left with a clear picture of exactly what was required. From here, myself and the content team brainstormed content/navigation. We felt that the existing website focused too much on services and very little on the main selling point - the house itself. We also thought that the content focus was skewed heavily towards weddings. Wedding offerings were a well established part of the business and needed very little publicising, the client wanted to increase the corporate services they could offer. We begun to get a clear idea of how the site should flow…

I left the content team to thrash out the finer details and started focusing on creating wireframes to give myself and the client a clear indication of intended layout and user journey. These were fairly high-fidelity wireframes, allowing the client to interact fully with the key templates. Luckily, the client was really happy with these which allowed me to head straight to the design phase.

New Gilmerton House website visual The proposed landing page. A hero video will play automitically to capture the beauty of the property.

The design phase

It’s great working alongside clients who fully trust you as a designer, fortunately this was such a client. They had no real hang ups with colour schemes and were happy to let us roll with what we felt suited the property best. To get a feel for what Gilmerton House was all about, I paid them a visit and they showed me around a little. I noticed that a lot of the features, ornaments etc were copper - cue brainwave! I began experimenting with various colour combinations and finally settled on a deep grey and copper colour scheme. Such a warm and inviting combination, and also in-keeping with the house itself.

I also wanted to showcase the property in its fullest. Fortunately the client had spare budget for some professional photos. It is such a fundamental element of any website, how many times have we seen great design let down badly by poor photography?

Armed with the colour scheme, a huge image bank and wireframes, the visuals quickly fell into place.

Gilmerton House home page design Here is the full home page. Quick links through to various services are the main focus.

The final product

With a design sign off in place, I began to put together a front-end framework and style guide to hand over to the development team assigned to the project. Development went as smoothly as the rest of the project - ideal!

In the end, we produced a website that the client were over the moon with. As with every site created, we would carry out a UX review 6 months after launch, sadly, I left Flintriver shortly after this project was completed and didn’t have the chance to check in with how the website is performing for them.