Website
Branding
Once home to England’s great landscape painter, Turner’s House allows visitors to experience a snapshot of the artist’s daily life in the heart of London. Built to J.M.W. Turner’s designs in 1813, the house – known as Sandycombe Lodge – now hosts tours, exhibitions and events. The organisation required a website that reflected the experience of entering Turner’s tranquil sanctuary and clearly showcased the varied activities that take place in the house.
The branding (created by Stop, Look and Listen) of Turner’s House revolves around the two contrasting sides to Turner: his inner, home life and his public persona as an artist. To capture this on the website, our design team focused on layering images, placing visuals of his artwork alongside photographs of the home’s interiors.
Windows are a recurring motif and our designers translated this into arched shapes and framed imagery that also evoke framed paintings. The design is simple and clean, allowing the focus to remain on Turner’s work and the beautiful photography of the home’s interiors.
Due to hosting numerous events and activities throughout the year, navigation across the website needed to be clear and intuitive. A new system of parent and child pages was established to make it easy to move around the site and find relevant information. The top navigation bar is simple with a bold, coloured box directing visitors to buy tickets.
A stronger narrative has been applied to the homepage, enabling visitors to enter Turner’s world and understand the varied activities on offer at Sandycombe Lodge. The previous website prioritised text, which made information difficult to find. On the new homepage, copy is used sparingly and serves either to set the tone or provide specific details.
Filters have been applied to the events page to make it easy to distinguish between exhibitions, classes & workshops and lectures. Problems with the previous events page meant that activities were listed chronologically, burying current and upcoming events deep within the site. The new page solves this problem by listing new events at the top of the page making it easy for visitors to buy tickets for future programming.
On the individual events pages, the venue, time, price and booking link are all clearly listed on the left-hand-side, while further copy about the specific event appears on the right-hand-side. Related events and testimonials appear further down to direct users to other events they may be interested in.
Bespoke blocks were built by our developers to allow Turner’s House staff to easily edit their own webpages. Built within WordPress, the blocks can be dropped onto the page in a variety of ways, allowing the team to add and adapt pages in a way that is dynamic and engaging, and is still in keeping with the wider website design.
