Marapu Cliff
A clifftop retreat in West Sumba. Cinematic, dark, and honest about what it refuses to offer.
Marapu Cliff
Overview
The flagship of a six-part hospitality series and the piece that set the design system the others follow. A single long-scroll page: cinematic hero, manifesto with real numbers, three villa types, a full-bleed quote, a day-by-day timeline, inclusions grid, gallery strip, and a booking calculator. Hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no dependencies.
Role
Brand invention, art direction, copywriting, design system, front-end build, deployment
Challenge
Most luxury hospitality sites are interchangeable: the same aerial drone shot, the same superlatives, the same empty infinity pool. The challenge was to make a fictional property read as a real operator with real constraints — and to do it without a framework, so the whole thing stays under a second to load on a slow connection.
Approach
Copy leads, design follows. The site tells you the wifi is adequate and nothing more, and that guests who want a resort should not come. Admitted trade-offs read as an operator's voice; unbroken superlatives read as a template. Photography was curated from Unsplash by building labelled contact sheets and choosing by eye rather than taking the first search result. Design tokens live in a separate base.css that the other five sites inherit.
Outcome
Live and verified at 1440px and 390px. The booking calculator is arithmetically correct (Headland House at $1,940 × 7 nights plus 11% tax = $15,074, checked by hand). Every photograph is credited on a dedicated page as the Unsplash licence requires, and a permanent ribbon labels the property as fictional.