Atelier Mirage designed private residences and boutique hospitality interiors from a studio near Saint-Germain. Their clients arrived through word of mouth and shelter magazines, and the studio's fear was legitimate: a website that felt like a website would cheapen the brand. The existing digital footprint was a Flash slideshow from 2007. The brief was unusual for its honesty — 'make it feel like our printed portfolio, and if it cannot, we would rather have nothing.'
Practical requirements sat under the aesthetic one. The audience splits between French clients and international — American and Middle Eastern — property owners, so full French/English parity was mandatory, not an afterthought. The studio needed a press archive for two decades of magazine features, and private mood boards: password-protected spaces where a client could review material and furniture directions during an active project without a single email attachment.
Full-bleed project spreads with a restrained typographic system, generous whitespace and image-led navigation. Projects read as short visual essays rather than grids of thumbnails.
Complete bilingual parity — every project text, caption and press entry translated and typeset in both languages, with language persistence and locale-correct typography.
A searchable archive of scanned magazine features and interviews, catalogued by publication and year — two decades of credibility made browsable in one evening.
Password-protected boards per active project, where the studio posted material palettes and furniture directions and clients left annotated feedback — killing the 40-attachment email thread.
Commissions directly attributed to the website in its first year — including a hôtel particulier renovation that covered the project's cost several times over.
Average session duration in the first year of analytics, extraordinary for a portfolio site and evidence that visitors were actually reading the projects.
International design blogs that featured the site itself in its launch quarter, generating a second wave of inbound enquiries from outside France.
// results vary by project — ask us how we measured this one
“Clients began arriving at first meetings having already read the site like a book. It filtered for exactly the clients we wanted — and quietly turned away the rest.”
Founder & Creative Director, Atelier Mirage · name withheld under NDA — reference call available// the studio has since merged — screenshots preserved as delivered
Editorial portfolios and presentation sites for studios whose reputation is visual. Send us the three projects you are proudest of — we will show you how they should look online.
