Material silence.
A bicultural architecture studio splits its life between Tokyo and Lyon. The work is quiet and obsessive. We made a site that holds its breath the same way.
- Client
- Architecture studio · Tokyo / Lyon
- Year
- 2025
- Scope
- Identity · Portfolio · Typography
- Duration
- 14 weeks · 3 people
The challenge.
The studio is small, careful, and quietly internationally respected. Their work — concrete, light, wood, restraint — needed to live online without being flattened into a Squarespace gallery. The previous site was a PDF and a Tumblr.
Their request: "It should feel like walking into one of our buildings on a quiet morning." No animation gimmicks. No stock photography. The work, the captions, the silences between them.
silence.
Fig. 01 — Homepage editorial spread. Index numbers reference each completed project.
Approach.
We treated the site as a building, not a page. Every project gets its own slow page — one continuous vertical scroll with image, plan, drawing, and the architect's note in their own handwriting, scanned. No back-button required.
- Index · 42 completed works, numbered and dated, single editorial homepage
- Project view · full-bleed photography, captions in two languages (FR / JA)
- Typography · one serif for thought, one mono for plans and credits
- Motion · none. Zero. Pages cross-fade. That is the entire motion language
- Bilingual · simultaneous French and Japanese, no English
System.
The palette is paper, ink, and one signal colour pulled from a recurring detail in their built work — a specific blue used on the joinery of three of their most published houses. Everything else gets out of the way.
Build & launch.
Astro for the front, a tiny custom CMS for the studio so they can publish a new project in 20 minutes with their own photographs and notes. No analytics, no cookie banner, no marketing layer. The site is one HTML file per project, served from the edge.
- Stack · Astro · custom flat-file CMS · Cloudflare Pages
- Weight · under 80kb on every page, photography deferred
- Privacy · no third-party scripts, no cookies, no tracking
"They made a website that is not loud. We did not know this was still allowed. Our clients now find us through it. We have a waiting list."Principal Architect — Studio Tokyo / Lyon