Gillian Cole Design

The Client

Exceptional Interiors, Delivered With Clarity, Control and Discretion

Gillian Cole is an interior designer and project director with more than 25 years across private luxury residences, heritage buildings, hospitality environments and international exhibition design. As founder and Managing Director of Perception International she led commissions from $30,000 to $14 million: a private residence on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, a discreet embassy commission in South Kensington, a jewellery exhibition at Baselworld in Switzerland, and the conversion of Walton Hall in Warwickshire from a stately home into a hotel and banqueting venue, won on a competitive pitch against established London and Manchester agencies and delivered in seven months. The work has always run well past creative direction into project programming, stakeholder management, conservation planning, specification, bespoke furniture and European procurement. She is now based in Mornington, Victoria, and available for selected private commissions and senior contract engagements with interior studios, architecture practices and developers in Australia and internationally.

The Project

A designer at this level is judged on taste before a single word is read. If the website looks ordinary the work is assumed to be ordinary too, and nothing further down the page recovers it. There was a second problem underneath that one. Gillian was moving from running her own firm to taking selected private commissions and senior contract engagements, which is a different proposition sold to a different audience. Architecture practices, interior studios and developers hire on evidence of delivery. Private clients hire on the eye. The site had to satisfy both without looking like it was trying to.

We designed and developed an editorial, photography-led site that gets out of the way of the work. Full-bleed interiors carry the pages, with a high-contrast serif for headlines, wide-tracked uppercase for everything small, and a warm neutral palette drawn from the projects themselves. The homepage opens on the practice's own position, interiors of distinction delivered with precision, then immediately supports it with the three facts a serious client checks: 25 years in the work, projects to $14 million, and a record across Australia and internationally.

Selected Work is the part that does the actual convincing, so it is built as case studies rather than a gallery. Each commission carries its location, sector, scope, the role Gillian held and the programme it ran to, then sets out the challenge and the design response. Walton Hall gets its own feature band on the homepage, because a competitive pitch won against bigger agencies and delivered in seven months is the clearest evidence of the commercial discipline the rest of the site claims. Chelsea, South Kensington, Baselworld and the Mornington Peninsula residence each do a different job, showing heritage, diplomatic, exhibition and contemporary coastal work in turn.

The paths through the site are deliberately narrow. One firm action, Discuss a Project, sits in the navigation and again in the hero, with a softer second path into the work for anyone who wants to look before they talk. Enquiries go through a form wired to the site's own API and on to a thank you page, so nothing depends on a visitor opening their mail client.

It is built mobile-first and server-rendered so pages arrive complete for search engines rather than waiting on scripts, with structured data and hosting on Cloudflare for speed wherever a client is looking from. Adding a commission is a matter of adding an entry, which matters on a portfolio site: the work it shows needs to be the work she is doing now.