Case Study
Founded 2020 by Andreas Agiostratitis and Nikos Koukourakis · Private residences · Luxury apartment buildings · Bespoke renovations · Hospitality · Philosophy: simplicity, material honesty, quiet precision · Our role: Custom web design and development · eproductions, Athens
Carefully. That is the honest answer. Every proportion, every margin, every transition will be read by clients who read space for a living — people who have spent their careers noticing exactly what everyone else misses. Designing for architects is a specific kind of pressure, and it has almost nothing to do with the clients being difficult.
RKTKTS is an Athens architectural studio founded in 2020 by Andreas Agiostratitis and Nikos Koukourakis — two architects whose work spans private residences, luxury apartment buildings, bespoke renovations and hospitality projects across Attica and beyond. Their practice is built on a specific and unfashionable set of commitments: simplicity over gesture, material honesty over surface effect, quiet precision over visual noise. Several of their buildings are now referenced within the Athenian architectural conversation as examples of how contemporary residential design can be both modern and durable.
When RKTKTS needed a digital home for that work, they came to eproductions for both halves of the project: the design and the development. That is a meaningfully different engagement from the one we described in our mousegraphics case study, where the client — the world's top-ranked packaging design studio — designed its own site and asked us to implement it flawlessly. Here, the creative responsibility was ours. Which means the design would be judged by two working architects whose entire professional training is the evaluation of proportion, alignment, rhythm and space.
The Brief: An Interface Built to Disappear
Architecture photography is among the most demanding visual content on the web. An architectural image is not a product shot — it is a compressed argument about light, volume, material and inhabitation. It rewards being looked at slowly and at scale. Any interface element that competes with it for attention actively damages the thing it is supposed to present.
This produced the governing principle of the entire project: the website's job is to disappear behind the work. Full-bleed imagery, so the photography occupies the full width of the screen rather than sitting politely inside a container. Restrained typography, present only where it is needed and never decorative. Generous negative space, treated the way an architect treats it — not as leftover area, but as an active compositional element that gives the work room to be seen.
The design context we were building into: RKTKTS already had a strong visual identity — a modular, minimalist logotype system developed by Saint of Athens, built on a grid and a stretching technique that lets the mark adapt to the size and format of any material it appears on. The website design had to extend that system natively into a digital environment, not simply place the logo on top of an unrelated layout.
Three Design Decisions That Defined the Site
Decision 01
Photography at full bleed — the work, uninterrupted
Every project image runs to the edge of the viewport. There are no decorative frames, no drop shadows, no captions competing for the eye. An architectural photograph on
rktkts.com occupies the screen the way a building occupies a site — completely, and on its own terms. The scroll behaviour was tuned so that moving through a project feels like moving through a sequence of considered views rather than paging through a gallery.
Decision 02
Typography as structure, not as voice
The typographic system is deliberately quiet: a restrained scale, tight control of weight and spacing, and text placed only where it carries information the image cannot. Project names, locations, typologies. Nothing that asks for attention. For an audience that reads proportion professionally, the typography needed to be defensible at every size — which meant designing the type scale as a system rather than choosing sizes page by page.
Decision 03
Navigation that gets out of the way
A studio portfolio has a simple informational job: show the work, explain who made it, provide a way to make contact. The navigation architecture was reduced to exactly that. No mega-menus, no filtering systems that impose taxonomy where a curated sequence serves better, no interface furniture that exists because most websites have it. Every element that survived the design process had to justify its presence against the question the whole project was built around: does this help the architecture, or does it compete with it?
Minimal Design Is Maximum Engineering
There is a persistent assumption that minimal websites are easier to build than visually dense ones. The opposite is closer to the truth, and this project is a clean demonstration of why.
A busy layout has a thousand places for imperfection to hide. A two-pixel misalignment inside a crowded grid disappears into the noise. A slightly inconsistent margin between sections goes unnoticed because there are twelve other things on screen. Minimal design removes all of that cover. When the page consists of an image, a line of type and a large amount of considered space, then the alignment of that type, the exact dimensions of that space and the behaviour of that image are the design. There is nothing else to look at, which means every decision is exposed.
“Minimal is never the easy option. A busy layout hides its flaws. A quiet one has nowhere to put them.”
The same logic applies to performance. A portfolio of architectural photography at the resolution these images deserve is, in raw terms, a heavy site. Serving it with the immediacy the design implies required the same multi-stage image pipeline we built for photographer Dimitris Poupalos: modern format conversion, responsive delivery sized per device, and viewport-priority loading so the first image is present the moment the page is. A minimal site that loads slowly is not minimal. It is just empty for longer.
What This Project Demonstrates
Principle 01
Designing for design-literate clients raises the standard permanently
Most clients evaluate a website by feel — they know when something is wrong but cannot always name it. Architects can name it. They will identify the specific margin, the specific alignment, the specific proportion that is off, because identifying those things is what they were trained to do. Working for this audience is the closest thing web design has to peer review, and it improves everything that comes after it.
Principle 02
For a portfolio, restraint is not an aesthetic preference — it is a functional requirement
The website of a creative practice exists to present the practice's work. Any design decision that draws attention to the website itself is taking attention away from the thing the visitor came to see. This is true for architects, photographers, industrial designers and artists alike. The best compliment such a site can receive is that the visitor never thought about it.
Principle 03
An existing visual identity is a brief, not a constraint
RKTKTS arrived with a considered modular identity system. The right response is not to work around it or decorate it — it is to understand its underlying logic (grid, adaptability, restraint) and extend that logic natively into the digital medium. A website that merely displays a brand's logo is not on-brand. A website built from the same structural principles as the identity is.
Principle 04
Design and development in one team removes the translation loss
When design and implementation sit with the same team, there is no handover — no moment where intent has to survive a gap between the people who conceived it and the people who build it. For minimal work, where the entire quality of the result lives in details a specification document struggles to capture, this integration is not a convenience. It is what makes the precision achievable at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a good website for an architecture studio?+-
Three things, in order. First, the photography must be presented at a scale and quality that lets the architecture be read — full-bleed imagery, high resolution, no decorative framing competing with the work. Second, the interface must be quiet: minimal navigation, restrained typography and generous negative space, because every visual element that draws attention to the website takes attention from the buildings. Third, it must load quickly despite carrying heavy images, which requires a deliberate optimisation pipeline rather than default hosting behaviour. The measure of success is that a visitor remembers the projects, not the site.
Should an architecture practice use a template or a custom-designed website?+-
For a practice whose value proposition is design judgement, a recognisable template is a direct contradiction of the message. Clients who are hiring an architect are hiring visual and spatial discernment; a website built on a widely-used theme signals the opposite. Beyond positioning, templates impose their own grid systems, typographic defaults and spacing scales — which is precisely where a design-led practice needs control. A custom design and build is more expensive initially and produces a site that is genuinely the practice's own, for a lifespan measured in years rather than a subscription cycle.
Why is minimal web design harder to execute than complex design?+-
Because minimal design removes every place an imperfection could hide. In a dense layout, a small misalignment or an inconsistent margin is absorbed by surrounding visual activity. In a layout consisting of an image, a line of type and considered space, those elements are the entire composition — so every proportion, every alignment and every transition is fully exposed and must be individually correct. Minimal design also demands more decisions be right the first time, because there is no visual complexity available to compensate for a weak one.
How do you keep an image-heavy architecture portfolio fast?+-
Through a layered image pipeline rather than any single fix. Source images are converted to modern formats (WebP, AVIF) that hold visual quality at much smaller file sizes. Responsive delivery serves each visitor a file appropriate to their screen, so a phone never downloads a desktop-resolution asset. Viewport-priority loading ensures the images currently on screen load first while the rest of the portfolio loads progressively behind the scroll. Combined with a lightweight custom codebase and proper caching, this lets a portfolio of large architectural photographs feel as immediate as a text page.
Is your practice's website working as hard as your portfolio deserves?
eproductions designs and builds websites for architecture practices, design studios and creative professionals in Athens and internationally — combining custom design, precision front-end development and the image performance engineering that visual portfolios specifically require.
Whether you need the full engagement, as with RKTKTS, or development only against your own finished design, as with mousegraphics, the standard is the same: a site that presents your work without ever asking to be noticed itself.
- Custom web design and development for architecture and design practices
- Full-bleed portfolio architecture engineered for high-resolution photography
- Advanced image optimisation — WebP/AVIF, responsive delivery, priority loading
- Brand identity extension — digital systems built from your existing visual logic
- Custom WordPress backends for independent portfolio curation
