The engagement
MIW Architects
A Chicago architectural practice working across commercial, residential, and mixed-use development, with projects reaching New York and Seoul. The brief was a gallery-first studio site that carries the photography without competing with it, structured so new work can be added as projects wrap.
- Scope
- End to end
- Practice
- Design & engineering
- Delivered
- 2026
- Status
- In service
Built with
Colophon
Interface
Next.js and Tailwind, deliberately restrained. An architecture practice is judged on its buildings, so the interface is built to get out of the way of the imagery.
Media
The projects page opens on a video reel of built work, then resolves into stills organized by the categories the studio actually sells against — commercial, residential, development, and custom fabrication.
Operations
Deployed on Vercel. Adding a completed project is a content change, not a layout change.
The practice
MIW works across commercial, residential, and mixed-use development from Chicago, with projects reaching New York and Seoul. Restaurant design is a particular specialty — the studio runs market research and feasibility studies and assembles investor-facing presentation packages alongside the architecture itself. On the residential side it's mostly renovation and new construction, with a high proportion of returning clients.
The brief
An architecture studio's site lives or dies on one question: whether the photography and the buildings are allowed to do the talking. The work is the entire pitch. The interface's job is to present it cleanly and then get out of the way.
What I built
A gallery-first studio site organized around the categories MIW actually sells against — commercial (restaurant, cafe, spa, daycare, office), residential (new construction, rehab, renovation), development (mixed-use, multi-family), and custom artwork and fabrication. The projects page opens on a reel of built work in motion before resolving into stills. Adding a finished project is a content change, not a layout change, so the gallery grows without a developer in the loop.