Silverbirch Serviced Apartments: a stay wheel that darkens as the stay lengthens
Concept build. Silverbirch Serviced Apartments 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
Silverbirch doesn't exist. We set ourselves the job of designing for an operator with 34 serviced apartments across New Town, Leith and Fountainbridge, let by the night, the week or the month, because that stretch (one guest booking three nights on a work trip, another taking three months for a project) is where most short-let sites go quiet. They price for the weekend and leave everyone else to phone up and ask.
What we built
A print-magazine spread rather than a hero. The masthead is small, the headline hangs across the edge of the first photograph rather than sitting over it, and a drop cap opens the standfirst the way a feature article would. Two asymmetric image-and-text pairs carry the apartments themselves, each on a different column ratio, so the page reads like turning pages rather than scrolling a template.
The stay wheel
The signature piece is a rotary dial with five bands, from a night or two through to three months and beyond. Turn it, by drag, by arrow key, or by the plain <select> underneath, all three wired to the same function, and three things move together: the rate and what it includes, the terms as a straightforward booking becomes something closer to an occupancy licence, and the section's own ground colour, which steps down from warm paper to a near-black slate-moss as the stay lengthens. The page gets calmer, not louder, the longer someone plans to stay.
That last part cost the palette some discipline. No single focus-ring colour clears contrast against all five band grounds, so the ring is assigned per band rather than fixed: five separate pairings, each computed rather than eyeballed, so a keyboard user never loses the outline partway round the dial.
Details that did the work
- Deposit and cancellation terms stated per band, not glossed into one paragraph
- The owners section states plainly that a short-term let licence is mandatory in Edinburgh and that change of use has a planning position attached, because ducking that is the one thing every competitor site does
- No type sits on either photograph, so no scrim was needed to force it to pass contrast
- The dial's
aria-valuetextand the form's success message were swept for the same tics as the rest of the copy
Where it stands
Audited 87 out of 100 across usability, uniqueness, beauty and freedom from generic AI patterns. The honest weakness: the H1 sits below the fold, following the standfirst rather than opening the page, which is the first thing a second pass would move.