From Holiday Listing to Luxury Brand
Havana — Port Douglas Beach House
The Finest House on the Platform
Havana, at 15 Wharf St, is one of Queensland’s most iconic beach houses. Absolute beachfront in Port Douglas, with five bedrooms, a 12-metre pool above the Coral Sea, and a top-to-bottom 2024 renovation by Squillace Architects. The home had been completely transformed, the website hadn’t.
Havana’s owner, Nathalie, was running the property’s online presence through Lodgify — a templated vacation-rental platform. Lodgify does a job: it puts a property online and takes a booking. But the templates and editing tools it offered didn’t give Nathalie enough control to achieve the premium feel the property deserved. Nathalie wanted a site that looked the way the house feels, and that she owned outright.
Check out the Havana website →
The Solution
GEN11 chooses the stack to fit the brief. For Havana, that meant a modern, open-source foundation on infrastructure the client owns outright: Next.js for an image-led, fast front end, Payload CMS so Nathalie manages her own content, hosted on her own domain. We rebuilt Havana from the ground up around three things that mattered:
An editorial site, not a listing. We took the design direction from high-end hospitality rather than holiday-rental software — image-led, minimal, generous space, the kind of restraint a luxury brand earns. Full-bleed photography of the actual house and video carry the page; the architecture and the Coral Sea do the selling. No busy widgets, no template seams, nothing that reads as software.
A site Nathalie owns and controls. The new site is a custom build on her own domain. Enquiries come to her directly. The content editor is built into the site itself, so Nathalie can update rates, photos and copy without coming back to us, and crucially she owns the site rather than renting it from a platform.
Fast, accessible, and SEO friendly. Behind the scenes, the property’s details such location, rooms, amenities and check-in times are described in a structured format that search engines and AI assistants can read directly. The build itself is quick and technically clean. On Google’s own Lighthouse audit, the industry-standard measure of site quality, Havana scores near perfect scores:
The result is a site that looks like it belongs to the property it represents, and a business that controls its own digital front door.
Beyond the Website
This project was about a property whose digital presence finally matches its physical one, and an owner who controls her own brand and her own channel instead of renting a corner of someone else’s platform.
GEN11 builds custom marketing sites for businesses that have outgrown the template. Sites you own outright, that look the way your product deserves, and that you can run yourself. If your website no longer matches what’s behind it, we can help.