Azade Ozkan: a website as considered as handmade furniture

The challenge

Handmade furniture sells on detail: the grain of walnut, a hand-woven cane back, the way one continuous arm flows into the back legs. A standard shop template flattens all of that into a grid of products with a cart. Azade Ozkan does not sell from a cart. Every piece is made to order, and finishes, lead times and care are discussed in a 15 minute consultation. The website had to make people want that conversation.

What we built

We designed and built a custom website in Astro, the same framework we use for our own site. It is fast, light and easy to extend as the collection grows.

• A collection that reads like a catalogue. The home page opens with the promise “dazzling, handmade furniture” and moves through the pieces one by one: the Sileo Chair in sculpted walnut and leather, the Cane Armchair, the steam-bent Arc Chair, the Bouclé Chair, the Velvet Armchair and the Cane Dining Chair.
• Product pages with room to breathe. Each piece gets its own page with the story of how it is made, the materials and dimensions, and a personalise option for finishes, so a visitor can already picture the chair in their own room.
• Filters by material. Visitors can browse the collection by material, such as wood, instead of scrolling through everything.
• One clear next step. Every page leads to a 15 minute consultation with Azade, introduced with her photo, so the call to action feels like an invitation from a person rather than a button.
• Recent work in context. A row of finished interiors, from a concrete couch in a living room to a walnut dining set, shows the furniture where it belongs.

Custom animations that slow the visitor down

Luxury is partly a matter of tempo, so we built the animations ourselves instead of using a template library. Headlines appear letter by letter, with each letter fading in on its own, so “dazzling, handmade furniture” builds up the way a piece of furniture is assembled. Text fades in as you scroll, and the consultation invitation unfolds line by line around Azade’s name. The timing is deliberately unhurried: the page asks for a moment of attention, the same attention the furniture deserves.

The animations stay light. They are written in plain CSS and a small amount of JavaScript, and the text is in the page from the start, so search engines and screen readers read it in full and nothing shifts while the page loads.

Status

The website is in its final phase. The collection, the product pages and the animations are built; the consultation booking page is being designed. We will add the launch and the first results here as soon as the site is live.