Saltmarsh House, a coastal guesthouse booking platform
A booking website for an independent guesthouse on a tidal marsh. The page itself follows a modelled tide, every room shows its price night by night, and the whole site is searchable from the keyboard.
Overview
Saltmarsh House is a complete website and booking platform for a small guesthouse: four rooms, a set of guided experiences and a journal. It has a public site, guest accounts, and an admin console for the people who run the house.
The design starts from the place. A tide model drives the hero scene, so the water level, sky and boats change with the time of day. The same model sets the start times on the experiences page, because a low tide walk has to leave when the flats open.
The problem
Small guesthouses are sold on a view and a feeling, but most booking pages are a form on top of stock photos. They also cannot show that some activities depend on the tide, so guests have to ask by email.
The solution
A site where the tide is part of the interface. Guests pick dates on a calendar that shows the price of every night, search rooms, walks and articles from one command palette, and see how a day lines up with the water. Staff manage rooms, rates, closures, bookings, articles and images from an admin console.
Key functionality
Hero scene driven by a harmonic tide model: water level, sky, sun, stars and boats follow the hour, with a time scrubber
Price calendar with drag-to-select dates and a nightly price on every day
Search palette (Ctrl or Cmd + K) across rooms, experiences and journal articles
Plan-a-day view: experience start times move with low water, high water, sunrise and sunset
Booking engine with seasonal rates, closures and a per-room lock so the last room cannot be sold twice
Guest accounts, cancellation by emailed link or from the account up to two days before arrival
Journal with Markdown, drafts, reading time, contents list and related articles
Admin console with roles for guest, editor and admin; bookings, rates, articles, images, enquiries and email history
Server-rendered pages, structured data, sitemap, skip link, labelled forms and reduced-motion support
Architecture
Two services. A Go API (chi, pgx) owns the rules: availability and pricing, booking transactions with PostgreSQL advisory locks, bcrypt password hashing, server-side sessions in an HttpOnly cookie, login throttling, origin checks and content-checked image uploads. A SvelteKit app (Svelte 5, server rendering) serves the pages and proxies /api and /media so the session cookie stays first-party.
Email goes through a mailer interface. With a Resend key it sends; without one, messages are only recorded in the admin email history, and the console says so. The tide is a two-constituent harmonic model for planning the day, not for navigation.
Contribution
Designed and built end to end by Burgess Awalayah Glay at BURGTECH Solutions: interface, tide model, API, database, tests and admin console.
