Celebrating a centuries-old restored trullo in a modern digital experience.
OttoConi is a luxury trullo - a traditional Apulian stone dwelling dating back to 1867 - lovingly restored by a group of entrepreneurs into a countryside retreat for the discerning traveller.
While the property had already been successfully listed through an established rental operator, the owners recognised an opportunity to establish their own digital presence, their own brand; the ability to tell the trullo's story on their own terms. Working with the owners, I helped develop a unique brand identity & immersive digital experience for the property, complementing the operators' own marketing and sending additional leads their way.
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- year-on-year visitor growth
Organic traffic grew from 376 unique visitors in 2024 to 504 in 2025, with no paid marketing.
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- year-on-year increase in referrals
Click-throughs to the booking operator rose from 83 in 2024 to 122 in 2025.
Building a brand
While the property was listed through an established rental operator, it was but one property among the hundreds in their portfolio. The owners desired their own platform with which to tell their story - not to compete with the operator as a booking channel - but to do justice to the trullo's storied history and establish a brand independent from that of the operator.
With the name already decided - meaning 'eight cones' in Italian - but little else in terms of visual identity, I started by designing a logomark that spoke to both the trullo's heritage and its distinctive architectural form. Three interlocking arched shapes rise within a containing circle, evoking the silhouette of the trullo's conical roof cast in front of the Mediterranean sunset. This understated geometric form is accompanied by a generously spaced wordmark set in bold, grotesk capitals, a nod to the contemporary twist on a classic style.
Designing the experience
One of the biggest opportunities in creating a bespoke experience was the ability to present the trullo in far greater detail than the operator's standardised property listing page would allow. Rather than attempting to show all of the features & photographs within the confines of a single page, I decided to present the property room-by-room in a virtual 'Tour', each with its own gallery of images and list of features.
Building for independence
Having researched the industry and what prospective clients responded to, I realised it was crucial that the owners had the infrastructure and the knowledge to make content updates themselves. I learned that the trullo's presentation and features would evolve with the seasons; furniture gets upgraded, décor can change - all of which necessitates new copy and/or photography coming in.
I settled on Strapi as a CMS solution; as an open-source headless CMS, it gave me the ability to define the custom content models required - not just for pages, but also rooms & amenities - while giving the owners the ability to make structured edits through a clean, easy-to-understand admin interface & without the need to touch any code.
For the front-end, I built the site using Nuxt, which provided server-side rendering for better SEO performance. I used GraphQL to fetch precisely the data needed for each view, keeping the site lean and fast, while TailwindCSS handled the styling throughout.
Quiet growth
Since launching towards the end of 2023, the site has grown steadily through purely organic traffic. In 2024 - its first full year - it attracted 376 unique visitors, a figure which increased to 504 in 2025. Crucially, clickthroughs to the operator's site increased by a substantial 47% over the same period, rising from 83 to 122.