Locèlle: a brand and booking experience for design-led stays

How might we make booking a design-led home directly from its owner feel as thoughtful and considered as the home itself? From the first inquiry to the final details, every step should reflect the care and character that make the home special.

Setting the stage

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I founded Locèlle, a curated collection of design-led vacation homes that guests book directly with the owner, with no service fees. As founder and founding designer, I owned the brand and the product experience end to end: how Locèlle positions against the platforms, the principles behind the design, and the system that carries them across every surface.

Locèlle is a passion project. I wanted to make something beautiful out of the things I care about most: travel, property ownership, content and storytelling, and solving a real problem. It is still pre-revenue, and I'm testing whether it can earn real traction.
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The homes had a strong point of view. The brand around them needed one too.

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The problem

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The big platforms own the traffic and the customer. A 15.5% service fee comes out of every stay, which raises the guest's price and squeezes the owner's margin at the same time. And a thoughtfully designed home is one of more than 8 million listings, ranked against look-alikes on volume and price.

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The best owners want out. They are building their own websites and brands, and more than 40% of hosts already take direct bookings. But a site of their own does not come with an audience. Owners struggle to drive traffic to it, and the category is fragmented, with no defining brand a guest can trust.

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That made design a business problem, not a styling one. With no platform checkout to lean on, the brand has to do the work of trust, for guests and owners alike.

Figures: Hostaway, Guesty and Lodgify reports.

The booking flow

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The diagram reads top to bottom:

Discovery: social media (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and more) and Google search lead to the property page on Locèlle. Email is the next traffic driver.
Decision: does the owner have a booking website?
Yes: the guest clicks out to the owner's booking website and books there.
No: a direct inquiry page on Locèlle opens a modal, and the guest sends a booking request to the owner.
End: both paths finish with the guest and owner dealing direct. No service fee. The owner keeps 100%.

Deliverables

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I made three strategic bets and built one system to carry them.

Compete on taste, not inventory. A restrained identity (one mark, a quiet palette, a single typeface) so the homes and their owners carry the page.
Make booking direct the obvious choice. The price, the Direct Book promise, and the route to the owner sit together on every property page, on desktop and on mobile.
Build an audience Locèlle owns. Editorial pages give owners the same weight as their homes, and an eleven-email program responds to what each person browses.

Underneath sits a documented design system: logo rules, color and type, a component kit, and six page templates. The brand now scales without me in every file.

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Outcomes

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Locèlle now has one documented system that covers the logo, color, type, components, six page templates and eleven emails.

Consistency. Site and email share the same type, colors, and components, so a guest sees one brand from inbox to inquiry.
Speed. New pages and emails are assembled from existing parts instead of designed from scratch.
A reason to return. The email series gives the site its first way to bring visitors back, on a schedule and in response to what they browse.
Early traction. With €0 spent on paid acquisition, Locèlle reached 40.2K search impressions and 419 clicks, moved its average search position from 22.7 to 13.6, and brought in 1.4K new users between January and September 2026.