Case study · Hospitality · Website design
Hotel
El Ganzo.
An underground recording studio, murals painted mid-stay, Mexico's first B Corp hotel — and a website that finally says it out loud.
70
Adults-only rooms on the La Playita marina
1st
Hotel in Mexico with B Corp certification
WHY?
The first item in the main nav — attitude leads
2012
How far the El Ganzo Sessions archive reaches back
$290
Where the master suite starts — price tags drawn as crowns
The old site read like a generic luxury Cabo property — amenity bullets and a calendar widget. The studio, the artists, the B Corp story never surfaced. We rewrote the homepage as a magazine spread and let the personality lead. The funnel follows.
01 · The brief
A hotel that doesn't compete
with its category.
Adults-only, beachfront in La Playita, with a working basement studio that has hosted Khruangbin, Julieta Venegas, Natalia Lafourcade, Kings of Convenience, and L'Impératrice. Artists in residence drop murals and room interventions mid-stay. Chef José Luis Hinostroza runs Baja-Med on the roof.
A creative-soul traveler arriving from Condé Nast or NYT Travel had no signal they'd found the right place. The brief: give them one at first scroll — and treat sustainability as a qualifying credential, not a footer link.
02 · Home & the arts
The homepage is a magazine.
The arts page is a venue.
Hover either page and it scrolls. Home runs from the mural headboard through the cultural calendar, dining, the area guide, and the #hotelelganzo wall. Arts & Music carries the residency program and El Ganzo Sessions — Rayland Baxter cutting “Lady of The Desert” in the underground studio, archives back to 2012.
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The homepage — a magazine spread, top to bottom
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Arts & Music — sessions, residencies, full moon yoga
03 · The cast
Winking bananas. Price-tag
crowns. A goose at checkout.
The hotel's hand-drawn universe runs through the UI — accommodations flanked by lashed bananas, rates crowned like royalty, room cards tilted like polaroids. Open the booking overlay and the masked rider from the headboard flies past on a goose. Even the funnel is in character.
04 · Goodies
Four venues, one page,
zero corporate voice.
Ganzo Downstairs with its reserve-a-table module, Gachoo Suhi Bar on the roof, the Ganzo de Platya beach club, in-room dining from the custom minibar cart — all under a nav item that says GOODIES instead of F&B. Hover to scroll the page.
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Goodies — downstairs, rooftop, beach, minibar
05 · The press & the pages
Dining tilts like a scrapbook.
Press clippings pin like one.
Section frames sit slightly off-axis, doodle clouds and cacti float in the margins, and the press room — Food & Wine, Gear Patrol, MSN — reads like a corkboard of clippings rather than a logos row.
Dining & spa — frames off-axis on purpose
Press room — clippings, not logo salad
The result
The right travelers recognize
it as theirs at first scroll.
The artists, the couples-with-taste, the Cabo regulars who refuse to stay at a chain — the site now gives them the signal the property always deserved. Booking stayed accessible; it just stopped owning the narrative.
“Some properties need a booking engine. El Ganzo needed a stage.”
Have a hotel with a personality the template keeps hiding?
SUUR designs and ships hotel platforms end to end — brand, UX strategy, and the build.