Project Context
Hound & Porter is a boutique UK estate agency with a clear visual identity and a deliberately warmer, less corporate tone than most in the sector. The Nurtur build involved bringing a fully resolved Figma design to life, the creative direction was already locked when I came onto the project, having inherited it from a previous developer with minimal handover documentation. The brief was simple in principle: build it as designed. The execution was anything but.
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The Challenge
The complexity here wasn't in the brief, it was in the gap between the design and what standard tooling could actually produce:
- Mid-project inheritance: I came onto the build after another developer had left, with limited context, no meaningful handover, and a live project timeline to maintain.
- Design-led constraints: The Figma designs were precise and fully resolved, every detail mattered to the client. That meant no shortcuts, and no falling back on default component behaviour when it didn't match.
- Elementor limitations: Several of the designed components required behaviour and visual fidelity that standard Elementor widgets simply couldn't deliver without significant customisation. Getting them to look and function correctly took considerably more work than the surface complexity suggested.
- Missing functionality: The design called for navigation patterns, pagination, previous/next article controls, that required functionality outside what the existing stack provided out of the box.
- Specialist page requirements: The land and new homes section required a bespoke carousel experience that standard solutions couldn't reproduce.
The Solution
Came up to speed fast and built what the project needed, not what was easiest:
- Rapid context recovery: Got up to speed on an in-progress build without a handover, identified what was done, what was missing, and what needed rethinking, then got on with it.
- Custom PHP extensions: Wrote custom PHP to add proper pagination and previous/next article navigation, functionality the platform didn't provide natively and that the design specifically required.
- Elementor customisation: Pushed standard Elementor widgets well beyond their defaults through targeted overrides and custom configuration to match the design specifications precisely, avoiding the temptation to either compromise the design or rebuild from scratch unnecessarily.
- Bespoke carousels: Purpose-built carousel components for the land and new homes section, tailored to the content type and interaction pattern the design called for.
- Focused, efficient delivery: Kept scope tight, worked through the build systematically, and shipped without letting the inherited complexity drag the timeline out.
The Outcome
Hound & Porter launched as designed, precise, polished, and ready for day-to-day use:
- Faithful to the design: Every page and component delivered to the Figma specification, the client's visual identity came through cleanly, without compromise.
- Custom functionality in place: Pagination, article navigation, and bespoke carousels all shipped as part of the launch build, not as post-launch fixes.
- Delivered efficiently: Despite the mid-project inheritance and the level of custom work required, the build was completed and shipped without extended delays.
- Distinctive in a crowded sector: The site stands out from the typical estate agency template, friendlier, more considered, and more closely matched to the agency's actual brand and tone.
Visual Highlights
