The brief
The Break Room is a new kind of pool hall in Ashford — a venue that wants to feel closer to a craft cocktail bar than a smoky back-street club. They came to us with a clear ask: a website that feels like the place. Cinematic, modern, atmospheric. Something that does the venue justice the moment a stranger lands on the home page.
Underneath the visuals, they had three practical problems to solve. Customers were turning up to find every table booked. Other nights the room was empty because nobody knew it was a quiet shift. And they had a King of the Club companion app for serious players that they wanted seamlessly integrated into the website experience.
How we approached it
We treated this as a bespoke web design project from the ground up — no template, no page builder, no compromises. Every section was designed in Figma against real venue photography and signed off before a line of code was written.
The cinematic video hero was the anchor: full-bleed, autoplaying, muted by default, with a layered colour grade that pulls the venue's blacks and neon highlights to the surface. From there the page tells a quick visual story — the room, the bar, the tables, the league nights — before dropping into the booking flow.
The booking system itself is a hand-built component talking to a Firebase backend. Slot availability is recomputed live as bookings come in, and the customer never sees a "fully booked" page without an alternative — instead they see a heatmap of the week ahead and a one-tap nudge to a quieter slot.