Year
2026
Client
Kestrel
Timeline
8 weeks
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Services
Design
Development
A quiet, editorial website for an architecture studio that lets the work breathe.
“
Samir turned a messy, five-page brief into a site that explains our work in one scroll. It finally feels like us.
Marcus Vogel
Head of Brand | Kestrel
01
Intro
A quiet, editorial site that lets an architecture studio’s work do the talking.
Kestrel had a decade of beautiful buildings and a website that hid them behind stock slogans and slow galleries. They wanted something calmer: a site that felt like flipping through a well-made monograph, not a sales brochure.
I shaped a simple structure around projects, process and people, then designed an editorial layout with generous white space, large imagery and a restrained type system. Everything was built in Framer so the team can publish new work in minutes.
02
Challenge
Showing a large, image-heavy portfolio without making the site feel slow or cluttered.
The studio had hundreds of high-resolution photographs across forty projects. The old site loaded everything at once and buried the best work under the newest uploads.
We needed a way to keep the archive complete while putting the strongest projects first — and to keep pages fast on any connection.
03
Solution
A curated project index, an editorial case study template and a strict image system.
I designed a featured index for eight key projects, with the full archive one click away. Each case study follows a flexible editorial template: a short brief, a large gallery and the details architects care about.
Images are exported to fixed sizes and lazy-loaded, and the CMS handles everything else, so the team can add new projects without touching the layout.
04
Result
A calmer, faster site that finally reflects the quality of Kestrel’s buildings.
The new site launched in eight weeks. Visitors now spend longer with each project, and the studio has started receiving enquiries that reference specific buildings — a sign the work is finally being seen.
2.4×
Time on project pages
Visitors now stay with each case study more than twice as long as before.
0.9s
Average load time
Image-heavy pages load in under a second, even on mobile connections.
Every project shows how I approach strategy, design and build.
I read every brief myself and reply within one working day — usually much sooner.
Designer & Framer developer
SAMIR®
10
Contact
Let’s start
your project.
A full brief or just a rough idea — either is a good start. Tell me what you need and I’ll reply with a clear plan.
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Samir Studio