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?
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