Furniture, Properly Shown

On saleTwo Editions are on sale today, Les Gourmands and Aperture Office. Complete React source, the original photography included. Single licence 89 USD, one published website. Studio licence 179 USD, up to five.

The problem with a furniture site built as a shop

• A four column product grid tells a visitor that every piece is equivalent and immediately available. For a made to order sofa in three widths and forty cloths, that is a lie the page tells before anyone reads a word.
• The moment a price sits under a thumbnail, the conversation becomes a comparison. Buyers who were considering a commission start behaving like buyers considering a checkout, and the enquiry never arrives.
• Filter systems designed for footwear collapse on furniture. Nobody browses seating by colour swatch. They arrive with a room, a dimension, a budget and a delivery date, in that order.
• Ecommerce themes give a single hero photo per product. A chair needs a front elevation, a side, a detail of the joint, the cloth at close range, and one image of it in a room. Five photographs, one argument.
• Trade buyers and private clients want opposite things from the same page. The shop template has one path. Atelier is drawn with two, and neither one apologises for the other.
• The result of using the wrong structure is not ugly. It is quiet. Serious enquiries simply stop, and no analytics dashboard will tell you why.

How the catalogue is structured in Atelier

Materials, dimensions and lead times

• Materials are a repeating CMS field with an image, a name, a reference and a short note. A visitor can see the oak, the walnut, the bouclé and the full grain leather at photographic scale rather than as a thirty pixel dot.
• Dimension fields are separate and structured: width, depth, height, seat height, arm height, weight. Separate fields mean they can be rendered as a clean table on desktop and a stacked list on mobile, from one source.
• A technical drawing slot sits beside the photography on every piece page. Line elevations with measurements are what a designer forwards to a client, and a site that provides them gets specified more often.
• Lead times are written as an honest range in the CMS, per piece, and shown near the enquiry action rather than buried in an FAQ. Twelve to sixteen weeks stated plainly loses fewer clients than a silence.
• Care and finish notes have their own field, because the person who buys a cloth sofa asks about the cloth six months later and should not need to write an email.
• A downloadable specification file can be attached per piece for trade use. The CMS field exists in the structure, ready for a PDF, a DWG or a 3D file.

Trade enquiries and showroom visits

Photography, and what the template asks of it

• Atelier is drawn for photography that has room to breathe. Full bleed images, long scroll intervals, and captions set small in the margin. Weak images will look weak, which is the correct outcome.
• The recommended set per piece is five frames: one hero in situ, one clean elevation on a neutral ground, one three quarter, one material detail at close range, one honest scale reference with a human or an object.
• Shoot the elevation on a consistent ground across the whole catalogue. When every piece is photographed against the same wall at the same height, the index page reads as a collection rather than a folder.
• Vertical crops are drawn separately for mobile. A landscape hero cropped by the browser cuts the arm off the chair, and no amount of CSS cleverness fixes a composition decided at the shoot.
• Image weight matters more here than on most sites. Framer serves responsive formats, and the guide sets the export dimensions and compression that keep a large photographic page fast on a phone.
• Motion is limited to slow reveals and a soft parallax on the hero. Furniture photography does not need to move. It needs to be given time.

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