A Seamless Luxury Hospitality Experience
Transformed The Estate’s fragmented sites into a unified platform that elevated their suite of hotels, spa, and experiences.
Role
Lead Designer at 829 Studios
Duration
12 weeks
Project Team
Design Support: Anna Yeo
Strategy: Eve Picard
Production: Gibson Starzynski
About
The Estate Yountville is a 22-acre luxury property in Napa Valley with two distinct hotels, a spa, and curated wine country experiences. Their digital presence was fragmented across multiple websites, leaving users unclear on how the properties connected. Our goal was to consolidate everything into a single online destination while positioning The Estate as a premier luxury brand.
Responsibilities
As Design Lead, I guided the full design process—from research and IA to wireframes, visual design, and mobile optimization. I created a component-based design system, refined navigation, and ensured accessibility standards were met. The result was a cohesive digital experience that unified the brand and elevated its standing in the luxury hospitality space.
Research
We kicked things off with stakeholder interviews, audience surveys, and analytics reviews of their existing sites. The insight was clear: users didn’t understand the relationship between Hotel Villagio, Vintage House, The Villa, and The Estate itself. It felt like three different brands rather than one cohesive destination.
Highlight experiences
Showcase unique experiences (spa, hot air balloon tours, wine country excursions)
Give the Spa its own destination page
Developers struggled to match accounts with the right use cases, often failing to complete tasks.
Improved information architecture
Integrate The Villa into the “Stay” section of the new IA
Centralize the events space
Centralize events under a single “Private Events” hub
Showcase Yountville
Highlight Yountville’s location as a draw from the homepage
Design Goals
1
Unified all properties and experiences into a single, elegant digital presence.
2
Highlighted the range of offerings beyond the hotels—spa, events, and experiences.
3
Positioned The Estate as a luxury lifestyle brand in the Napa Valley market.
4
Delivered a mobile-first design, knowing most visitors would explore from their phones.
Wireframing
We built wireframes in Figma to test navigation and content hierarchy. One of the key user flows we validated was:
Accommodations Landing → Hotel Villagio → Room Profile → Book Now
The flow needed to feel effortless, letting users move between hotels and explore offerings without ever feeling lost.
Visual Design
Disclaimer: The Estate has since added new brand colors and marks to their visual identity.
The visual design leaned on a neutral grey base, accented with maroon for Hotel Villagio and lavender for Vintage House to give each property its own identity. Serif typography brought elegance, balanced by a clean sans serif for clarity, while photography-led layouts let the Napa Valley setting speak for itself.
Impact
The redesigned site launched with a unified brand presence and a scalable design system. For the first time, users could clearly understand the relationship between the hotels, spa, and experiences, making it easy to explore and book.
Less than a year later, The Estate Yountville sold in what was reported as the most expensive hotel property transaction in Napa Valley history (December 2021). While the redesign wasn’t the sole reason for the sale, it contributed to elevating the brand’s perception and digital footprint in the luxury hospitality space.
