Erfgoed Logies
A curated catalogue that guides before it searches.
Erfgoed Logies is a Dutch platform for stays in historic buildings: castles, farmhouses, monasteries, mills, across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. Its one real advantage over the large booking sites is that it turns properties down. That is easy to state and hard to make visible in an interface that also has to sell nights, gift vouchers and host memberships. I led the design at Super Interactive from the design sprint to launch, and ran the project alongside it.
Role
Design Lead, at Super Interactive
launch
2026
Scope
Strategy, UX/UI
Scale
Rebrand and complete redesign
The challenge
The discovery phase put two audiences first: families with young children and couples over 55. Both are loyal, both distrust the volume of generic platforms, and the older group finds most booking sites loud and hard to read. The client's brief was blunt: no blocks, no frames, nothing that looks like Booking.com. Under that sat a business model moving from subscription to commission, a budget that could not fund everything the discovery had wished for, and a booking engine, OpenGDS, that the platform had to connect to rather than replace.
The Design
Four routes in, and the search bar second.
The obvious build for a catalogue this size is search-first, the way Plum Guide does it. Erfgoed Logies wanted a visitor who lands before choosing. I put four entry points on the homepage: by season and region, by who you are travelling with, by mood, and by building type. Full search sits one level down, on the catalogue page. It exists and it works; it just isn't the front door.
Destinations by season, one of four routes in before the search.
The selection criteria are page content.
The usual way to say "we don't take everyone" is a seal or a footer line. I put the four assessment criteria, heritage value, authenticity, restoration with respect and a building that speaks, on the homepage and again on the host page. The host page is written so that convincing and converting happen on one URL. The line "a mark of quality, not an advertisement" is a section, not a slogan.
The four criteria, numbered, on the homepage. "That is a choice."
Availability lives somewhere else.
The catalogue connects to OpenGDS, the owners' booking system, and availability could only be checked inside that environment. That breaks the pattern every visitor expects: pick dates, see what is free. I designed around it. The site collects dates and party size up front and carries them into OpenGDS, so the visitor arrives with the question already asked; the catalogue never shows a price or a free date it cannot verify; and the step across is labelled as a step rather than disguised as one flow. It is a compromise. A flow drawn without the constraint would keep the visitor on the site to the end; this one hands them over, and does it openly.
No price, no calendar. One button hands the visitor across.
A layout for images I did not choose
Owners supply their own imagery, at every level of quality, and the client had seen how a gallery can carry weaker images when the whole is composed well. The grid is built to absorb that: no frames, no shadows, so the page holds its structure through white space and type rather than through what sits inside the image slot. The type system has three tiers, display serif, text serif and sans, because a display face fails on card titles at 18 to 24px, and that is where a reader over 55 spends most of their time.
Two columns, no frames, no shadows. Spacing carries the structure.
Where it stands now
Live since 2026
Live since 1 August 2026, in Dutch and English, with over 200 houses in five countries. The owner dashboard, guided onboarding for guests and a loyalty layer were cut on budget. [AANNAME: the content model and component library were built with them in mind, so adding them is extension, not rework.] The Figma file went to the developers with named components and a semantic token layer, and what is live is what was designed. Six weeks in is too early to say what has held. The first real test is whether the commission model reaches the share of revenue the client set for the first six months [x: mag dit genoemd worden, en zo ja het percentage?].
Contact
Want to ship products together?
I'm looking for a team where design doesn't stop at handoff. If that sounds like yours, I'd like to hear about it.
Send me a message at martijnruitenbeek@gmail.com
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