Website design, development, and a logo revamp for Melbourne Hall. A Grade II* listed historic house and gardens in Derbyshire.
A stately home with formal gardens, a sculpture garden and, thanks to Johnny Vegas, a fair bit of glamping. When the Channel 4 show aired, the site took over 100,000 visitors at once without a wobble.
The Challenge
Melbourne Hall is a Grade II* listed historic house and gardens in Derbyshire, with a genuine cultural programme running alongside it – exhibitions like The Secret Sculpture Garden, supported by Arts Council England and local partners, sit alongside the more traditional visitor-attraction side of the business. The site needed to carry that weight properly: heritage and gravitas on one hand, but still functioning as a practical visitor-attraction website people could use to plan a trip, check opening times, and find out what’s on.
The existing branding needed work too – the logo wasn’t doing the property justice, so alongside the website itself, the brief expanded to include a full logo revamp.
Logo redesign: from low-res to scalable vector
Since the original logo was only available as a low-resolution flat image, I redrew and simplified it as a vector graphic. This brings it up to modern web standards and ensures it will display sharply across all devices, screen sizes, and future applications. The before and after can be seen below:
The Outcome
I designed and built the site from scratch and revamped the logo alongside it, so the whole identity – not just the website – now reflects a property with several centuries of history behind it. The design treats the Hall and Gardens with the respect a Grade II* listed site deserves, while staying genuinely usable for a visitor working out when to come and what they’ll see.
The site now supports both sides of what Melbourne Hall does – the historic house and gardens as a visitor attraction, and the ongoing exhibitions and events programme – under one coherent brand rather than feeling like two different things bolted together.
Johnny Vegas: Field of Dreams – ecommerce
For Johnny Vegas’s Field of Dreams series on Channel 4, we added full ecommerce functionality to the website, enabling customers to browse and book glamping vehicles directly online.
The project came with a unique challenge: the show’s prime-time broadcast drove a massive, concentrated spike in traffic, with the site handling over 100,000 concurrent users at peak – the majority hitting the search functionality simultaneously to check vehicle availability. To keep the site fast and stable under this load, we significantly upgraded server capacity and implemented aggressive caching, ensuring a seamless experience for viewers turning to the site in real time during the broadcast, with zero downtime despite the surge in traffic.
