A builder who was selling design, on a builder's website.
No.91 Developments build outdoor rooms across Cheltenham and the Cotswolds, oak pergolas, cedar cladding, hardwood decking, garden kitchens. The craft was already excellent. What it lacked was a way of being seen: a brand that held together, and a website that let the work do the selling.
A trade business selling a design product.
No.91 sit in an awkward gap. The work is design-led and the price point reflects it, but the category expects a builder's website: a phone number, a gallery of thumbnails, and a form. Clients were arriving with the wrong expectations set, then being surprised in both directions.
The job was to close that gap without pretending to be an architecture practice. The positioning had to stay honest, these are builders who make beautiful things, while the presentation moved up to match what they actually deliver.
A mark built the way they build.
I designed the identity as well as the site. The mark takes "NO 91" and makes it structural, the letterforms overlap and interlock as flat planes rather than sitting in a row, which is exactly what the business does with timber and stone. Two colours, no outline, no gradient. It works cut into a sign, printed on a van, or stitched onto a polo shirt.
The palette then came off the work itself rather than being imposed on it, sage and tan from the mark, deep evergreen for text, and a warm off-white that lets Cotswold stone sit on the page without fighting it.
- Zilla Slab for headings, a slab with enough weight to feel built rather than decorated
- Outfit for everything else, geometric, light, gets out of the way of the photography
- Light weights throughout, so the images carry the contrast instead of the text
- Photography is the hero on every page; no stock, no renders, only completed builds
- Generous whitespace, the opposite of the busy trade-site convention
- One clear action per page rather than a phone number repeated six times
Build photography, used as a portfolio.
No.91 photograph their own completed builds. Most trade sites treat those images as evidence that a job finished, dropped into a thumbnail gallery. The design decision here was to treat them as the primary content: large, uncropped, one build at a time, with the layout doing the work of making a set of site photographs read as a body of work.
The images arrive as they arrive, shot on site across different days and different weather. The site cannot regrade the light, so it does the next best thing: a consistent frame, consistent scale and consistent spacing, so the page holds together even when the photographs vary.
Worth showing what they start with.
The finished images sell the outcome, but they hide the actual value. These are the conditions No.91 typically inherit, tired boundaries, failing walls, gardens that have been left to do their own thing for a decade.
Putting these on the site was a small argument I had to win. Trade businesses instinctively hide the messy start. But the gap between these two states is the product, and showing it is what makes the finished photography credible rather than aspirational.
Split the page, offset the photographs.
The layout puts a plain statement of what they do and where on the left, and lets an offset collage of real builds carry the right. No carousel, no hero video, no stock. The homepage answers "what is this and is it for me" above the fold, then gets out of the way.
Testimonials sit next to the job they describe rather than in a quotes carousel. A recommendation from someone whose garden office you can see is worth considerably more than five stars floating on their own.
Then I took the hosting bill away.
The site was built in Webflow, which was right for getting it launched and wrong for what it cost to keep running. In 2026 I re-platformed it onto Cloudflare Pages as a faithful port, same design, same content, no visual change the client would notice, minus the recurring fee.
- Static export deployed to Cloudflare Pages, verified against the live site before any DNS change
- Contact form rebuilt as a Pages Function, Webflow's form backend does not run off-platform
- Dead Webflow reCAPTCHA and external asset references stripped out
- A small business should not pay a platform subscription to serve six static pages
- The design was never the thing tied to the platform, only the hosting was
- Port first, redesign later, as separate decisions with separate risk
Unglamorous, and one of the more genuinely useful things I did for them.