Hospitality
Rai
Nine rooms in an old teak house above a valley north of Chiang Mai, open through the rain season. An invented brand, built as a working site rather than a mockup, to show what a hotel looks like when the pictures are allowed to be slow.
A study, made for a category rather than a named business. Client work appears here only once the client has seen it and agreed.
Concept site · hotel · built, not a mockup
01
Why a hotel
Hospitality buys both of the things this studio makes. A hotel needs a site and it needs film, and it is one of the few categories where a beautiful picture is not decoration but the actual product being sold. It was also the honest gap in our portfolio: we were asking for site work at the top of our price list while showing only ads.
02
The rule the copy follows
No hospitality language. Nestled, oasis, escape, sanctuary, indulge, curated and journey are all banned from this page. Every hotel site in the world runs on those words, which is precisely why they are interchangeable. Everything on Rai is concrete instead: a number, a material, a time of day, a thing that would be true if the place existed.
03
Selling by subtraction
The page says there is no pool, no spa, no air conditioning, that the last four kilometres are unsealed, and that guests walk the final two hundred metres while somebody brings the bags. It says a number of people read that and do not book. Naming who a place is wrong for is a far stronger claim on the right guest than another photograph of a towel.
04
The part photographs cannot do
Eight beautiful pictures still leave a visitor unable to say how big the place is or where nine rooms fit. So the house is modelled the way it would be built: posts on stone footings, bearers and joists, a deck laid as boards, plank walls, jambs and a sill framing every opening, rafter tails under a deep overhang, courses of tile to a ridge cap. Nine bays of shutters hang at nine different angles because nobody ever closes all nine. Surfaces are procedural — grain, board lines, tile courses — generated on a canvas at runtime so nothing extra crosses the wire, and periodic by construction so an eighteen-metre wall has no seam. It stands in a hillside with three hundred plants on it, because a house floating in a void beside those photographs is what gives a concept away.
05
Not our site with a hotel in it
The obvious move was to give Rai the treatment our own site gets: a camera flown along a rail through a story. We did that first and then took it out. A rail is cinema grammar, it suits a studio whose first piece is a short film, and stamping it onto every concept would make the portfolio a showreel of our own habits rather than a set of answers to different businesses. A hotel is not a film. It is a building somebody inspects before committing money to a room in it, and the last thing they do is choose which room. So the camera barely moves and the building does: it turns, the roof lifts away, and pointing at a room in the list lights that bay inside the house. The control is an ordinary list of buttons, so it tabs, it reads out, and it works before the scene has loaded or if WebGL never starts at all.
06
How it was made
Eight images at roughly a tenth of a credit each, generated against one shared house style so the brand holds together across every frame. Without that shared instruction each image is lit by a different photographer on a different day, which is the most common way a generated portfolio piece announces itself. The house is 1,032 triangles and 55 KB, deliberately under the line where the pipeline would compress it, so no decoder is ever fetched.
07
Why it says concept in the corner
A brand rendered at full fidelity is indistinguishable from a real client's work. A badge sits on every screen of the site and links back to this page, because letting a visitor believe we had been hired by a hotel that does not exist would be the only dishonest thing on an otherwise measured portfolio. The rates page says the same in plain words.
Measured
What it took.
A concept site is not put through the mute test — that test exists to check whether a stranger can name a category in one second, which is an ad's problem and not a hotel's. What is worth recording instead is what the piece cost and what it was built from.
- Imagery
- 8 frames, one shared house style
- Cost of the pictures
- Under 1 credit, about 1% of one clip
- The house, modelled
- 6,752 triangles, 44 KB compressed
- Measured
- 60fps, Intel integrated, shadows on
- Scene
- One canvas behind the page, 6 beats
- Build
- Next.js, three.js, Blender, Lenis
- Banned words in the copy
- Nestled, oasis, escape, curated, journey
- Bookings taken
- None. It is a concept.
The portfolio piece that proves the thing we were charging most for and showing least of. It also cost less to photograph than a single second of video.
Yours
See your own homepage, redone.
We build the top of your page the way we would build it, on your own words and pictures, before anyone pays anything. If it is better than what you have, we will talk about the rest of the site.