Eleven Experience

Eleven Experience is not a hotel group in any conventional sense. It is a collection of remote, deeply immersive lodges and expeditions — fly-fishing in Patagonia, surfing in the Azores, skiing in the Dolomites, safari in Botswana — each one a fully guided, fully staffed experience at the furthest edge of what luxury adventure travel looks like. The proposition is singular, the locations are extraordinary, and the photography required to communicate all of that is, to put it plainly, relentless.

Building the Eleven Experience website meant solving a problem that most hospitality builds do not face at this scale: how do you create a platform that carries the visual weight of a hundred images on a single page, communicates the spirit and character of locations on four continents, and still loads fast enough that the person planning a £20,000 trip does not watch a progress spinner while their first impression forms?

The answer was an architecture built from the ground up around that constraint — not performance optimised after the fact, but performance-first from the first technical decision.

Built Together with Matter Of Form

Eleven Experience came to us through our partnership with Matter Of Form, who led the creative and strategic direction. The division of responsibility is the one that works best in this partnership: Matter Of Form brought their deep understanding of the luxury travel market, a design direction that captured the tension between wild adventure and refined comfort that defines Eleven's brand, and a client relationship built on trust. We brought the engineering architecture, the performance infrastructure, and the development execution.

By the time a project reaches us from Matter Of Form, the creative decisions are settled and our job is to realise them without compromise. That means no 'we can't do that technically' conversations that result in a diluted design. It means finding the technical path to the intended experience — even when the intended experience involves a page that asks a browser to handle more imagery than most websites serve in their entirety.

The Stack: React, Umbraco 13, Cloudflare Workers

The technology choices for Eleven Experience were made around the specific requirements of the build, not around familiarity or convenience. Umbraco 13 as the CMS — a mature, flexible .NET-based platform whose content modelling capabilities allowed us to build a module library that the Eleven Experience team can operate intuitively, without needing developer involvement for every content update. React on the front end, delivering the dynamic, component-driven experience the design required without the performance overhead that a less structured approach would have introduced.

The image infrastructure is the piece that makes the whole thing work. Cloudflare Workers handle image processing at the edge — resizing, format conversion to AVIF and WebP, quality optimisation, and delivery from the CDN node closest to the user. An image that exists in the CMS as a full-resolution file from a professional photographer is served to each user at precisely the right resolution for their device and viewport, in the most efficient format their browser supports, from a server geographically close to them. The network round-trip is minimal. The file size is a fraction of the original. The visual quality is indistinguishable from the source.

This pipeline handles pages with over 100 images without the load time degradation that would make such a page commercially untenable. The photography is the product — it communicates the lodges, the landscape, the experience — and the infrastructure exists to let it do that job without asking the user to wait for it.

A Flexible Module Library Built to Last

Eleven Experience is a living website. New lodges are added. Seasons change the photography and the availability. Expeditions are added, modified, retired. The content team needs to be able to manage all of that without a development ticket for every update — and the module library needs to be flexible enough to serve new content configurations that were not anticipated when the site was built.

The module library built in Umbraco 13 is designed around that requirement. Each module is a self-contained, configurable unit: defined inputs, sensible defaults, and enough flexibility within its design constraints to handle the range of content it will realistically need to serve. The content team can assemble pages from the module library in the CMS without breaking the design system — the constraints are built into the modules, not enforced by a developer reviewing every edit.

Highly maintainable is not a marketing phrase here. It means that a page built two years after launch, by a content editor who was not involved in the original build, using modules that have been in production throughout, will look and perform as well as the pages built on launch day.

Navigation That Earns Its Clarity

Eleven Experience's portfolio spans multiple continents, multiple activity categories, multiple seasons, and a range of experience types from intimate lodge stays to fully guided multi-week expeditions. Navigating that breadth without overwhelming a first-time visitor — who may arrive knowing only that they want something extraordinary — required navigation architecture that thinks carefully about how discovery actually works for this audience.

The navigation is designed to orient rather than enumerate. It surfaces the primary entry points — by destination, by activity, by experience type — without confronting the visitor with the full complexity of the catalogue before they have found their footing. The information architecture mirrors the way a knowledgeable travel consultant would guide a conversation: broad context first, then progressively more specific as the visitor's interest sharpens.

Conveying the Lodges: Photography, Motion, and the Sense of Place

Each Eleven Experience property has a character that is entirely its own. The Dolomites lodge and the Patagonia lodge share an owner and a philosophy, but almost nothing else — different landscapes, different light, different wildlife, different guiding culture, different reasons to go. The website needs to communicate that individuality for each property rather than homogenising the portfolio into a generic luxury adventure product.

Photography is presented at maximum impact, often full-bleed and edge-to-edge, with layouts that vary by property to reflect its specific character. The motion language — how the page arrives, how imagery reveals itself as the visitor scrolls — is calibrated to evoke the pace and atmosphere of each location. Every animation is GPU-composited, frame-rate tested on real mobile hardware, and fully respectful of the prefers-reduced-motion preference.

The spirit of adventure is not a tagline on this site — it is present in the engineering choices. A page that loads in under 2.5 seconds despite carrying the visual weight of a hundred images sends a signal: this is an operation that takes every detail seriously. That is entirely consistent with what Eleven Experience promises its guests — the logistics handled invisibly, so the experience itself is all that remains.

Performance at Scale

Pages carrying over 100 images achieve Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mid-range mobile connections. Cumulative Layout Shift is effectively zero — images are sized in the layout before they load, so the page does not reflow as assets arrive. Interaction to Next Paint is responsive throughout, including on gallery pages where reveal animations are running alongside asset delivery.

The Cloudflare Worker image pipeline is the primary reason these numbers are achievable on a site with this photography volume. Without it, the same content would produce a very different experience. The infrastructure investment is invisible to the visitor and fundamental to the result.

A Platform Built to Grow With Eleven

New lodge pages are added through the CMS by the content team, using the existing module library, and inherit the full performance infrastructure — the image pipeline, the CDN delivery, the React component library — automatically. A site that gives the content team the freedom to manage and expand it, while maintaining the standards that made the original launch exceptional, is an asset that compounds in value over time.

The Eleven Experience website is exactly that. It is what we built with Matter Of Form, and it is the standard we bring to every build in the luxury hospitality and travel space.