Fernwood Studio · Architecture
A portfolio that loads before the photographs do
1.1s mobile LCP on an image-heavy portfolio
- Client
- Fernwood Studio
- Industry
- Architecture
- Delivered
- Stack
- Next.jsSanityFramer MotionTailwind CSSVercel
// results
- 1.1s
- Mobile LCP
- 0.0 CLS
- Layout shift
- −90%
- Time to publish
- +74%
- Enquiries
// the project
Overview
Fernwood Studio is a nine-person architecture practice whose work is almost entirely visual. Their previous site did the photography justice and took eleven seconds to prove it.
The brief was unusually clear: keep the art direction, lose the wait, and let the studio manager sequence a project's images without touching code.
The challenge
Full-bleed photography and Core Web Vitals are natural enemies. Every project page opened with a 4MB JPEG, and the gallery preloaded all of them. Layout shift was severe enough that visitors regularly tapped the wrong project.
- Mobile LCP of 11.2s; CLS of 0.38.
- Image sequencing was a developer task, so projects went live weeks late.
- No structured data at all — the practice did not appear in any rich result.
The solution
Art direction that survives optimisation
Every image now comes through Sanity with a hotspot, an LQIP and real dimensions. The hero is the only priority image on the page; everything else is lazy with a blur placeholder that matches the final frame closely enough that the page never visibly jumps.
Sequencing in the CMS
The gallery is an ordered array with per-image captions and a full-bleed toggle. The studio manager publishes a project in an afternoon.
Making the work findable
Each project emits CreativeWork structured data with materials, completion date and location, and the practice picked up rich results for a dozen local queries within two months.
// screens
// what they said
“It is the first time our website has felt like the work. Fast, quiet, and we can update it ourselves the week a project completes rather than the quarter after.”
// live site
See Fernwood Studio in the wild.
The work is live and still running. Have a look, then tell me what you are building.
