Alpenglow 8704

Alpenglow 8704 started as a commission for a real two-bedroom vacation rental at River Run Village in Keystone, Colorado, in the closest building to the gondola: 120 steps from the lift. The condo was already listed on the usual booking platforms, but those listings struggled to present all that the condo truly had to offer. We set out to fix that by creating a site of its own: one that shows the place properly, tells the story of the location, and keeps booking one tap away wherever a visitor happens to be reading.

The design is built around a highly detailed alpine scene (layered mountain skyline, drifting snow, pines, and a sun that becomes a moon) set under elegant, editorial type. A scene control in the corner of the screen changes the entire illustration through four times of day: dawn, noon, sunset, and night, each with its own colors and mood. The visitor's choice is remembered on their next visit.

The condo itself is presented through dozens of photographs, all color-corrected to one consistent look and exported at three sizes in WebP, so that a phone pulls down a small gallery tile where a full-screen view gets the large one. The gallery filters by room and area and opens into a full-screen viewer, alongside an animated map of the village, a swipeable quote carousel, and a "Good to know" FAQ. The site also keeps itself current: the booking headline, its accent color, the particles drifting behind it, and the Things to Do guide all move from ski season to summer on their own.

WordPress is where most of our builds start, but this brief did not call for a content manager or plugins. Nobody was going to log in and publish, and the parts that do change (the season, the time of day) change on their own. Because of this, the site was coded with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript instead, with the mountains, the sky, and the village map drawn in code rather than downloaded as photographs. Doing this allowed the site to remain fairly light and simple, while still presenting all of the extraordinary things the condo has to offer.

The owner sold the condo before the site went live. Rather than shelve the work, we renamed the property, cut everything tied to the real listing, and republished the build as a demo anyone can walk through. Every booking button now opens a notice explaining that nothing here is bookable, the phone number is gone, the guest quotes were replaced with sample copy labeled as such, the rental markup was swapped for markup describing the page as a work sample, and the whole site is kept out of search results. What is left is the build itself, running exactly as it would for a real property.