The Challenge
A landmark property without a home online.
Sycamore Stables is a beautifully restored equestrian facility in Malibu — a Grand Prix arena, premium boarding, and decades of history, all within reach of the Pacific. The brief was to translate that real-world prestige into a website that felt as considered as the property itself, while staying easy for the owners to share with prospective clients.
The Approach
Let the place speak. Get out of its way.
I built the site around full-bleed photography, a restrained editorial type system, and equestrian-specific language reviewed line by line with the owners. Every facility — arena, stalls, Eurosizer — got a numbered, consistent treatment, so the site reads as one accurate, premium system from the homepage through to the gallery.
The Process
From property walk to launch.
01
Discovery
Walked the property, interviewed the owners, and audited how comparable estates present themselves online.
02
Art Direction
Directed and culled the photography into a tight edit that leads with the land and the architecture.
03
Design System
Built a coastal-canyon palette and an editorial serif/sans pairing flexible enough for every page.
04
Build & Launch
Hand-built the responsive front end, wired the gallery and inquiry flow, and shipped with local SEO.
The Work
Designed & built,
Designed & built,
screen by screen.
Homepage — a single, confident first impression
A full-screen hero of the arena in action sits behind the ivory wordmark and serif headline, with a single call to action, Explore Sycamore, leading visitors into the property.
Contact — everything visitors used to go without
A complete contact and visit page where that information was missing before: an inquiry form, address, hours and phone, a live Google Map with directions to Cross Creek Road, and an FAQ answering what riders ask before their first visit. Scroll inside the window to see the full page.
Registration — paperwork moved online
Separate adult and minor registration paths collect participant, medical and emergency details, then hand off to DocuSign so riders review and sign the liability waiver before their first visit.
The System
A quiet palette and
A quiet palette and
an editorial voice.
A coastal-canyon palette and a serif/sans pairing give the site its calm, high-end character. Material touches carry it further — a leather-textured brown section with a soft vignette, and a faded sepia, camel-and-beige wash over the imagery that ties every page to the land.
Photography
Built to show, not tell.
The site's modern photo gallery puts the property forward: a curated, culled edit of the arena, barns and grounds, with captions written in the owners' voice. A preview of the photography it showcases:
9
Pages Designed
25+
Custom Sections
40
Days to Launch
3
Responsive Breakpoints
100%
Mobile Responsive
90+
SEO Score
100%
Custom Build
2
DocuSign Agreements Integrated
Deliverables
End to end,
End to end,
design through launch.
Responsive website design
Front-end build & deployment
Photography art direction
Copy refinement & tone
Interactive gallery & lightbox
Embedded DocuSign liability form
Local-business SEO & schema
Open Graph & social cards
Responsive across mobile & tablet
Analytics, SEO & AEO
Built to be found,
Built to be found,
and measured.
[One or two sentences on how the site was set up to be found in search and in AI answers, and how its traffic is measured.]
Analytics — [headline]
[What is tracked and what it shows.]
SEO — [headline]
[Search setup and results.]
AEO — [headline]
[How the stable shows up in AI assistants' answers.]
Notes from the build
“The hardest part wasn't the design — it was restraint. A property this beautiful doesn't need decoration. My job was to build a frame quiet enough to let Malibu do the talking, and precise enough that a discerning equestrian client trusts it on sight.”
Diego Berlin — Creative Director
From the Client
