Making a floor you can’t visit feel like one you’ve walked

The stated request was a website refresh to show the new amenities floor. The actual problem was narrower and more useful: a commercial leasing decision involves several people who never visit together. A broker scans buildings. A facilities lead checks specifics. A chief executive is shown three options in a meeting.

Each of them meets the building first as a web page. So the design question was never how to present the amenities floor. It was how a person who will never stand in that room understands what it would be like to work there — in under two minutes, on a phone, between other things.

01 — Research

“Prospective tenant” turned out to be three people with three different questions. The broker wants floorplates, availability and specifications fast, and leaves the moment the page makes them hunt. The decision maker wants a feeling: is this a building our people will be glad to come into? The operations lead wants the practical detail.

The existing site served the first group adequately and the other two barely at all. A review of comparable Manhattan listings showed the same pattern almost everywhere.

That gap was the opportunity. Rather than adding an amenities page to an existing structure, the amenities floor became the emotional centre of the site, with the specification content kept fast and unglamorous alongside it. Two jobs, two treatments, one page order.

02 — Structure

I mapped the site as a sequence rather than a menu, on the basis that most visitors arrive at the top and scroll rather than navigate. The order answers questions in the order people ask them.

• Building identity and location — orientation in one screen
• The amenities floor — the reason to keep reading
• Spaces and floorplates — specification, scannable
• Neighbourhood context — what surrounds the building
• Leasing contact — reachable from every section

03 — Interface

Photography leads, copy follows

Amenity space sells on atmosphere. Every section leads with a full-bleed image and keeps its explanatory text short and set below, so the page reads as a walkthrough rather than a brochure. Copy length was capped deliberately — if a space needed a paragraph to justify it, the photograph was wrong.

Specifications stay plain on purpose

Floorplate data was set in a high-contrast, tightly spaced block with no decorative treatment at all. Brokers are scanning for numbers, and anything expressive there slows them down. The contrast between the two treatments became the signposting — you can tell which mode you are in without reading a word.

Contact never more than one action away

Leasing contact sits persistently within reach rather than only at the foot of the page, because the moment someone decides to enquire is unpredictable and rarely at the end. ■

04 — Afterwards

What I’d take into the next one

The strongest decision on this project was refusing to treat “amenities” as a content type. Once it was reframed as the argument the whole site makes, the structure resolved quickly. I now start property and product work by asking which single section is doing the persuading, and build the order outward from that.