Bjerk - Cabin Direct-Booking Site

The Challenge

Bjerk is a single timber cabin set above a quiet fjord. The owners built it in 2022 and listed it on Airbnb the same season. The bookings came, but every stay cost them around 15 percent in commission, and the OTA listing flattened a property that was deliberately quiet, deliberately small, and deliberately not for everyone. After 2 seasons of paying margin to a platform that did not understand the cabin, the owners wanted a website that finally matched what guests actually walked into.

The Approach

A single-page direct-booking site that read like the cabin felt. One hero, one map, one booking widget. A gallery of 6 framed moments from the property. 3 named spaces, the hearth, the loft, the porch. A guestbook of stars and short reviews. No CMS, no chrome, no plugins. The site had to load fast on a phone in poor reception and feel inevitable on a desktop. In hospitality, the website is the first room.

A timber-clad hero with a slow drift over the cabin and the lake at dusk. A booking widget that calculates nights and totals before a guest reaches a confirmation. An asymmetric gallery of 6 photos sized by importance, not symmetry. 3 rooms presented as cards with their own square meterage and quiet copy. A custom monochrome map with a pulsing copper marker on the cabin and labels for the trail, the waterfall, and the village. The visual language was deliberate: warm parchment, deep forest, a copper ember, an editorial serif paired with a clean sans.

The Outcome

The morning the site went live, 2 direct inquiries were waiting. Inside the first month, more than half of repeat bookings came through the site rather than Airbnb. Repeat guests stopped routing through OTAs entirely. The 15 percent commission Bjerk used to pay on every stay is now retained as margin. For a one-property business, that compounds fast.