Kestrel Land & New Homes: a map sheet with a 28-plot site plan
Concept build. Kestrel Land & New Homes is an invented firm. This was made to show how we approach a property brief, so nothing here is a client result and no figure describes a real business.
The brief we set ourselves
Kestrel doesn't exist. We set ourselves the job of designing for a land agency and new-homes seller that reads a county the way a surveyor does, as parcels, allocations and grid references, rather than as marketing renders. Precision was the whole pitch, so the design language had to come from the discipline itself, not from a mood board of one.
What we built
The vocabulary is a printed OS sheet: hand-drawn contour lines, a true grid overlay, a legend box, hachures, a scale bar, a north arrow. The hero opens as a map sheet, drawing over the frame, and the aerial photograph beneath it registers as the contour layer's opacity concedes on scroll, so the drawing appears to resolve into the ground it represents. Nowhere on the page is there a card grid. The landowner and housebuilder comparisons run as ruled tables, the way a schedule of land actually gets set out.
The plot map
The signature piece is a site plan for a fictional 28-plot scheme, Orchard Rise: spine road, turning head, public open space, an attenuation basin, real site-planning logic behind which plots get the wider frontages. Each plot is its own SVG polygon carrying its own schedule data, reachable by hover, click or native Tab, all three routes pulling the same plot's entry into a side rail. Sold and reserved plots are marked by hatch density and a text stamp, never by colour alone, and a plain list mirrors the same 28 plots as the accessible fallback that becomes the primary control on narrow screens.
Details that did the work
- Land vocabulary (option agreement, promotion agreement, hope value, overage) used in context and explained once, not glossary-dumped
- The planning timeline states plainly that determination periods slip, rather than implying a schedule Kestrel can't control
- A single accent colour couldn't clear contrast against both the map field and the dark chrome, so the focus ring is a two-layer halo instead of one fixed hue
- The enquiry form asks approximate acreage and current use, because that's what a landowner is actually offering
Where it stands
Audited 86 out of 100 across usability, uniqueness, beauty and freedom from generic AI patterns. Two honest weaknesses: the plot polygons read schematic rather than draughted, the ceiling of hand-authoring 28 shapes and a road network in one build pass, and the schedule panel sits empty until a plot is chosen, which a second pass would fix with a default entry on load.