Halcyon
Website Design
Duration:
4 Weeks
Industry:
Wellness
A slow, spacious website for a wellness retreat that invites visitors to breathe before they book.
Halcyon runs small retreats in the hills outside Lisbon. Their bookings came mostly through word of mouth, and the old site did little to help. Guests described the place as quiet, warm and unhurried, but the website felt like a generic hotel template full of buttons and banners.
We rebuilt it around the feeling of arriving. Soft natural light, long scroll moments and very little noise set the tone, while photography leads every section. Copy is short and personal, written in the voice of the founders, and each page has one clear thing to do instead of five competing calls to action.
Behind the calm surface sits a practical structure. Retreat dates, room types, prices and travel details are all easy to find, and the booking flow has been reduced to three clear steps. The whole site is built in Framer so the team can add new retreats, update photos and change prices without needing a developer.
The team wanted a site that felt calm without hiding the practical details people need before paying for a week away. Visitors arrive curious but cautious, and most of them are deciding on a phone during a short break in a busy day.
The old site had grown messy over the years, with outdated retreat pages, broken links and three different booking tools. Some guests had booked dates that no longer existed. Any new site had to clean all of that up and give the team one reliable place to manage their offer.
There was also a strong emotional brief. Halcyon is a small, personal business and the founders were nervous about anything that felt too polished or corporate. The design needed to feel crafted and human, not like a luxury chain.
We separated mood from logistics. The story pages are slow and visual, with large images and short paragraphs, while a persistent booking panel keeps dates, prices and availability one tap away on every page, including on small screens.
We replaced the three booking tools with a single integrated flow, rewrote every retreat page with the founders and built a simple CMS structure so each retreat has the same clear information: who it is for, what a day looks like, what is included and how to get there.
The new site launched in four weeks. Direct bookings increased noticeably in the first season, enquiries about basic details dropped because the answers were finally easy to find, and the founders now update the site themselves every week.