Atelier Noord

Online viewing rooms for a gallery whose collectors mostly live in another time zone.

Year: 2025
Location: De Waterkant, Cape Town
Duration: 7 weeks

Client: Atelier Noord
Role: Web design, Front-end build, CMS
Discipline: Web & Digital
Delivered: 2025 · 7 weeks

The problem

What we were actually solving

Atelier Noord sells large-format works to collectors who need to imagine them at home, and increasingly those collectors are in London or Amsterdam. The existing site showed works at 800 pixels wide on a grey grid, with no sense of scale and no way to enquire without leaving the page.

The approach

Warm interior with sheer curtains and an oval opening onto a sunset sea view

How the work was made

Works are served as progressive high-resolution images with a deep-zoom viewer, so a collector can inspect brushwork on a laptop. Everything is lazily loaded and colour-managed, because a gallery site that shifts the colour of the work is worse than no site.

A scale tool renders each piece against a standard 2.4-metre wall and a human silhouette. It is the single feature the gallery director asked for, and it is the one that gets used on almost every enquiry.

Viewing rooms are time-boxed and shareable by private link, which lets the gallery run a two-week online show for a specific collector without publishing it. The CMS makes building one a fifteen-minute job.

The outcome

Online enquiries more than doubled, and the gallery now runs four private viewing rooms a quarter alongside its physical programme.

Increase in online enquiries: 2.3×Increase in online enquiries
To build and publish a private viewing room: 15 minTo build and publish a private viewing room
Of enquiries now come from outside South Africa: 38%Of enquiries now come from outside South Africa
Weeks from kickoff to launch: 7Weeks from kickoff to launch