Everything you are walking through was made by hand over about a week, mostly at the wrong hour.
The rooms
Eight paintings, one per room, generated and then re-generated until each one could be told apart from its neighbours at a glance. That last part was harder than it sounds: five interiors from the same hand at the same time of night arrive the same temperature, and the first Long Room was a wall with a window and a book on a table, which is also a description of the study.
They ship as WebP at 1536 by 1024, about 200KB each. The originals are 3 to 6MB PNGs and never leave the repository.
What you are clicking
Nothing in a room is a picture of a button. Every hotspot is a rectangle measured off the painting itself, in percentages, so the fire stays on the fire at any screen size. The portrait hall's ten frames were not placed by eye: the mats are the only near-black regions in that painting, so the boxes were found by flooding the shipped image for them.
The paintings are cropped to fill the screen, which on a phone means you see about a third of the width. So on a phone you can drag the room and look around.
The type
Marcellus for names and titles, Mukta for everything small, EB Garamond for anything long enough to read. Mukta is an Indian typeface drawn for Devanagari alongside Latin, and it is a large part of why this place reads the way it does. All four are served from this domain. Nothing is fetched from anyone else.
Underneath
A static site. There is no server answering when you open a page, only files, which is why it opens as fast as it does and why no number of people arriving at once can slow it down.
Postgres and a small CMS sit behind it, but they run on a laptop and their work is finished before the site is built. Prisma, Express, Next.js, Tailwind, and one honest pile of hand-written SVG for the marigolds and the frames.
The house
The plan is a real plan. North is north, and walking east from the study puts the screen where the map says it should. Three doors are still shut because there is nothing behind them yet, which is a better thing for a door to be than open onto an empty room.
