Balancing individuality with scale

Bunkhouse builds one-of-a-kind hotels, each with its own design sensibility and cultural character. Across Texas and Mexico, the brand counts multiple hotels and restaurants, from a music and poetry-inspired property in Austin to a beachfront boutique stay in Baja California Sur. 

At first, we worked with Bunkhouse to build standalone sites for individual hotels, but this approach evolved into creating a single platform that accommodated all of its properties. Having everything in one place made it easier for the Bunkhouse team to manage the sites and add new hotels, while leaving room for each property’s look and feel to effortlessly come through.

People don’t choose a Bunkhouse hotel because it feels like every other hotel in the collection. Instead, they choose it for its character, its local neighbourhood, and the feeling of being somewhere truly one-of-a-kind.

Even with so much range between the Bunkhouse hotels, the answer wasn’t more custom sites. Instead, each property had to be brought together digitally without losing any of the individuality that guests love. The single system needed to be strong enough to support every hotel and make adding new ones easy, yet flexible enough to let each one’s personality take the lead.

For Bunkhouse, the answer was building a design system that was consistent enough that no hotel site needs to start from scratch. It had to accommodate properties, from the nostalgia-infused Austin Motel to the 1960s-inspired heritage Hotel Saint Cecilia, all across the Bunkhouse brand. Shared templates, booking, and accessibility gave every site a consistent foundation, but room to customize kept each hotel’s character at the forefront.

In 2023, 12 hotel sites rolled out based on these standards, with shared components making the process fluid and quick. Features were added to make discovering events easier, booking smoother, and to showcase the Bunkhouse brand and its properties. 

The partnership didn’t end with the rollout. As Bunkhouse has grown, we’ve continued to refine and evolve the digital experience. That has meant new hotels, Spanish-language sites and a platform modernized to meet changing needs. Most recently, a UX/UI refresh has focused on keeping the site easy to navigate and book on.