Digital strategy and website for an architectural practice with fifty years of built work — and a clear need to articulate what made them distinct.
Cullinan Studio commissioned a complete overhaul of their digital presence to mark their fiftieth year — a significant moment for a practice whose founder Edward Cullinan had shaped a generation of British architecture. The brief wasn’t just to build a better website. It was to make fifty years of work feel like a living argument for a distinct way of practising architecture.
Five key goals
The project began with workshops run across the entire practice — not just leadership, but the people who used the site daily and the clients it needed to reach. What emerged was candid: the practice felt the website made them look irrelevant, failed to show what made their work distinctive, and buried fifty years of projects in a structure nobody could navigate. Five strategic goals emerged from that conversation and shaped everything that followed.
The portfolio problem
Competitor research exposed a pattern across architectural websites: almost every practice showed what they had built without explaining why they built it that way. Portfolios as catalogues, with no point of view. We named this the portfolio problem, and it gave us our strategic direction — the Cullinan site had to lead with philosophy, not output.
The Cullinan Ethos
To solve the portfolio problem we defined the Cullinan Ethos — five recurring themes traceable across five decades of project work: Creativity, Context, Collaboration, Community, and Climate. The strategy reframed Cullinan not as a name but as a methodology — a consistent, coherent way of approaching architecture that clients and collaborators could understand and connect with regardless of where they entered the site.
Defining personas
With a strategic framework in place, we ran a structured research programme — interviewing the audiences Cullinan needed to reach and those who navigated the site regularly. This surfaced four distinct personas, each with different goals, entry points and depth of engagement: a client evaluating practices against a scoring system, a contractor accessing project specs on the go, a student researching for a distinction, and a journalist looking for a story. The site architecture was built around all four.
Content architecture
Before any wireframing, we conducted a deep content audit across three sources: Cullinan’s offline archive, their existing site, and the requirements of a new CMS. Every project in the archive was assigned fourteen data fields — including five mandatory tags — standardising decades of material into a searchable, filterable system. This groundwork made it possible to radically simplify the site map: a sprawling, deeply nested structure collapsed into something clean and navigable.
Filtering projects
With a vast archive, the filtering experience was critical. We sketched, prototyped and tested multiple approaches until we had a solution that returned real-time results via project tags — letting any user find the right project with minimal friction, regardless of how they were thinking about the work.
Interactive timeline
To make the archive into an argument, we designed an interactive timeline that revealed how fifty years of projects connected and informed each other across each dimension of the Cullinan Ethos. The tool transformed a catalogue into a narrative — making the practice’s accumulated experience visible as a coherent body of thought.
Case studies
Individual project pages were redesigned to move fluidly between metadata and long-form content — giving users with different levels of engagement a natural way into each project, whether they were scanning or reading in depth.
Animated shorts
To launch the site, we produced a series of animated shorts — one for each value of the Cullinan Ethos. The films gave the practice a way to communicate their philosophy in a format designed to travel: social, press, and beyond the website itself.
