Lonesome Valley
A canyon community, made simple for the people who live there.
- For
- Jonas Club Software
- Role
- Senior Web Designer and Developer at Jonas Club Software
- When
- 2022 to 2024
- Sector
- Club community
- Stack
- Kentico, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Captured from the live site in October 2026. Clients keep their sites moving after handover, so some details differ from the version I delivered.
The brief
Lonesome Valley is a private residential community in a box canyon in North Carolina, with dining, a spa, real estate and events for its residents. The old site had no clear direction and was hard to use, for a membership in the thousands.
What I did
As Senior Web Designer and Developer at Jonas Club Software, I redesigned and redeveloped the site on Kentico around one idea per section: what the valley is, where to eat, where to unwind and how to live there. Residents reach Canyon Living, Real Estate and Weddings & Events from a single band of three, and the member login sits in the header on every page.
Visual concept
EB Garamond sets the headings, an old-style serif with soft, bookish curves that suits a community proud of a history going back to 1895. Montserrat handles text and buttons, clean and geometric, so the practical parts of the page stay crisp.
The palette comes from the valley: charcoal (#0d0d0d) for the hero, cream (#fef7ea) for the story, stone (#cac6ba) for the frames, and an olive (#8a7c4e) band that echoes the hillsides. Nothing is drawn with a ruler: the band has dry-brush edges like a stroke of ink, and the photographs fade out softly at their edges, which picks up the hand-drawn horse in the logo.
Palette
- Charcoal#0d0d0d
- Cream#fef7ea
- Stone#cac6ba
- Olive#8a7c4e
- White#ffffff
Type
Display
EB Garamond
Old-style serif
Text
Lonesome Valley is a private residential community in a box canyon in North Carolina, with dining, a spa, real estate and events for its residents. The old site had no clear direction and was hard to use, for a membership in the thousands.
Montserrat
Geometric sans
Signature detail
Drawn by hand
The old site had no clear direction, so I gave it a naturalistic one. Sections meet on dry-brush edges instead of straight lines, and the photographs bleed out at their borders like ink on paper, so the whole page feels made by hand, like the valley it describes.
On the olive band I wrote a small script of my own: hovering Canyon Living, Real Estate or Weddings & Events swapped the band behind the three boxes for that box's photograph. It is the same idea as the Sites I designed section on this site, where hovering a tile changes the background, and I built it by hand, without AI.
The homepage, section by section
- A dark hero with the brushed horse mark and the line Family | Nature | Simplicity.
- Discover Lonesome Valley: the history and the land, set on cream.
- A full-width photo band listing the amenities, with Discover Canyon Living and Explore Real Estate.
- Dine at Canyon Kitchen and Relax at Canyon Spa as photographs with offset, framed cards.
- An olive band of three: Canyon Living, Real Estate, Weddings & Events.
- Contact, location and social links over a faded photograph of the valley.
3 questions about Lonesome Valley, answered
What was Arvind's role on Lonesome Valley?
Senior Web Designer and Developer at Jonas Club Software (2022 to 2024).
What did the work on Lonesome Valley cover?
Kentico, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What platform was Lonesome Valley built on?
Kentico 8, the release Jonas Club Software ran its club websites on. It dates from 2014 and was five major versions behind Kentico 13 at the time. Version 8 has no plugins and no themes, so everything beyond the stock templates was written by hand in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
