South House

South House runs short and mid-term coastal homes across Brighton, Hove and Worthing. Founder Matthew Baker's brief asked for one site serving two audiences with almost nothing in common: guests choosing somewhere to stay, and owners choosing who runs their property. For the guest side it set three objectives — discover and book the homes, build trust quickly, drive direct bookings. That third one is the commercial problem. Every booking taken through a major platform costs commission and hands the guest relationship to the platform, and a direct channel only earns the click if it can answer what the platforms answer instantly: is this home free on my dates, and what does it cost?

We built the brand, wrote the copy for both audiences and shipped the site in Next.js on Vercel. What makes it a booking site and not a brochure is the Guesty integration: read-only calls to the Open API put live availability and nightly prices for all seven homes on South House's own pages, from the date search in the hero through to each home's card, then hand the guest to the Guesty booking engine on the same domain. Read-only was a deliberate constraint, so the site can never alter a calendar or create a reservation. Getting there took some unglamorous work. Guesty rate-limits token issuance and returns no Retry-After header, so an over-eager token request took live availability off the site for a week before we traced it; the fix caches one token for twelve hours and shares it across serverless instances, around two requests a day. The owner side is built on Matthew's own line, which now opens the management page: most homes do not have a management problem, they have a revenue strategy problem. The site went live on 28 July 2026. It is too new to claim search results — Search Console logged its first full month in August 2026 — so this is a build case study, not an SEO one.