Real client · In production
Mauruuru La Pedrera
Site for a three-house vacation rental complex in La Pedrera, Rocha.
- Role
- Contributor — design and development
- Year
- 2025
- Stack
- HTMLCSSJavaScriptMulti-language (ES/PT/EN)
The problem
The complex was only rented through Airbnb and Booking, with no site of its own showing the three houses together. The idea was an independent shop window that presents the place properly and hands the booking off to the platforms already in use.
What I built
- A page for each of the three houses, with a gallery of the complex and its surroundings.
- Guest reviews pulled from the booking platforms.
- The site in three languages (Spanish, Portuguese and English) for the area's Brazilian and Argentinian visitors.
- Booking buttons that lead to the complex's Airbnb and Booking listings.
Technical decisions
Not building a booking engine
Handling our own availability, payments and cancellations would have been an entire system, with a real risk of double-booking alongside the platforms. The site sells the place and delegates the transaction to Airbnb and Booking, which already solve payments and trust.
Three languages by design, not as a patch
La Pedrera gets a lot of Brazilian and Argentinian tourism. Copy was separated from markup from the start, so adding or fixing a language never means touching the page structure.
The photos are the product
In vacation rentals the decision is made by looking at images. The gallery is the centre of the page, and the photos were optimised to load fast without losing quality.
What I took away
- Working as a team on the same codebase, splitting sections and reviewing each other's work.
- Planning internationalisation before writing the first screen: retrofitting it costs twice as much.
- That sometimes the best technical decision is not to build something and lean on an existing platform.