Kitchens this good should not look like a brochure.
Matt Smith-wood is an interior designer and a finalist on BBC One's Interior Design Masters, working across bespoke kitchens, bathrooms and whole-house interiors. The product photography was already at magazine standard. The problem was that it was being presented in the visual language of a fitted-kitchen showroom, which quietly undercut everything the work was arguing for.
The category convention is the enemy.
Every competitor site looks the same: soft serif, warm greys, rounded corners, a hero carousel, and the word "bespoke" four times above the fold. It is a language that signals "kitchen company", and it flattens genuinely distinctive work into the same undifferentiated middle.
So the art direction went the other way. Hard uppercase display type, unapologetic black, images at full bleed with no decorative chrome, and an editorial italic reserved for the one or two moments where the writing earns it. The register to aim at was Wallpaper* and Livingetc, not a showroom brochure.
One letter and a full stop.
I designed the identity alongside the site. The mark is a single lowercase m with a full stop, high-contrast, drawn with the stroke weight of a display serif, and confident enough to work at the size of a stamp. The full stop is doing the work: it turns a letter into a statement, and it echoes the way the wordmark sets as MATT SMITH-WOOD. across the homepage.
A monogram matters more than usual here, because it is the thing that ends up etched on a cabinet, embroidered on workwear, or sitting alone on a business card. It had to survive without the name attached.
Black, white and two stones, because every kitchen in the portfolio brings its own colour story, and a brand palette with an opinion would fight all of them.
- Bebas Neue, display only, uppercase, set enormous and tight
- Cormorant, editorial italic, pull quotes only, never body copy
- Inter and Roboto, interface labels and body text, quiet by design
- No rounded corners, no drop shadows, no gradient overlays on photography
- Images full bleed or hard-edged; never floated in a soft card
- One editorial italic moment per page, maximum, scarcity is what makes it land
Put the designer on the homepage.
In this category the buyer is not choosing a product, they are choosing a person to let into their house for three months. So the homepage leads with Matt himself at full bleed, name set enormous across the bottom, and the credential stated plainly underneath. No carousel of kitchens competing for attention before you know whose they are.
The kitchen collection is structured as nine named ranges, Kyoto for Japanese-inspired minimalism, Barcelona for urban industrial, Stockholm for Scandinavian restraint, and so on. Naming them after cities does a lot of quiet work: it gives a buyer a vocabulary for taste they might not otherwise be able to articulate, and it turns a catalogue into a set of stories.
Let the kitchens be the art direction.
Each kitchen has a name and a material story, and the site is structured around those rather than around a features list. Barcelona is oxidised copper against espresso oak. Copenhagen is hacienda black against soft matte light grey. That is the level the buyer is actually shopping at.
Sell the millimetre, not the room.
The wide shots get the enquiry. The detail shots are what close it, because the thing separating a bespoke kitchen from a good fitted one is entirely in the junctions, the tolerances and the brassware. So detail imagery got its own treatment rather than being buried in a lightbox.
Same discipline as the No.91 photography: graded as a set so the brass reads as one consistent finish across every project, rather than four different golds shot under four different lights.
A component library, because pages keep getting added.
The failure mode for a site like this is not the launch. It is month nine, when three new pages have been added by three different people and the type scale has quietly drifted. So the art direction was written down as a component library rather than living in my head.
- Type scale with explicit roles, which face does display, which does editorial, which does body
- Section patterns: full-bleed image, split, detail grid, pull quote, CTA
- The hard rules written as rules, so breaking one is a decision not an accident
- Live site is the faithful Webflow port, running on Cloudflare Pages
- The brutalist direction is built out and demonstrated on a full kitchen page
- Next step is client validation before rolling it across the remaining pages
The live site already runs the bold, uppercase register. What is proposed rather than shipped is the harder-edged evolution of it, the full brutalist treatment across every page. That exists as a built, working kitchen page plus a component library, deliberately, because showing Matt a real page beats showing him a mood board. Rolling it out is his call, not mine.