Case Study: A New Digital Home for St Botolphs Holiday Cottages

Some projects are a pleasure from start to finish. The St Botolphs brief was one of them - a genuinely beautiful estate with a compelling story to tell, a client who knew exactly what they wanted, and a set of technical challenges interesting enough to keep things engaging throughout. The result is one of the strongest builds we've delivered at Metcalf Media, and one we're particularly proud to put our name to.

About St Botolphs

St Botolphs is a historic estate near Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, with roots stretching back to 1656. The grounds - incorporating a walled garden, a walled orchard and open woodland - are home to a collection of unique holiday properties: courtyard cottages, a secluded woodland retreat, a shepherd's hut and glamping cabins in the orchard. Every property has its own character, its own setting and its own private hot tub.

The estate had recently invested in a stunning new set of professional photographs - images that genuinely captured the quality, warmth and seclusion of the properties. The brief was to build a website worthy of them.

The Brief

The client came to us with two core requirements. First, a premium website that would communicate the class and character of St Botolphs - something that felt modern and visually exciting without losing the warmth and rusticity that makes the estate special. Second, and more technically involved, a seamless integration with their existing property management platform, Guesty, so that property information only ever needs to be updated in one place.

That second requirement was the crux of the project. St Botolphs lists their properties across multiple booking platforms - Airbnb, Booking.com and others - all managed through Guesty. The client was understandably unwilling to add a new website into the mix as yet another system requiring manual updates. If they updated a description, changed a photo, or added a new amenity in Guesty, they wanted the website to reflect it automatically. No duplication of effort. No risk of information getting out of sync.

Part One: Design and Front-End Development

The design work began with a clear brief: classy, modern, spacious - and capable of doing justice to the photography. St Botolphs sits in a particular visual territory that required careful handling. Too rustic and it risks looking dated. Too sleek and it loses the warmth and character that defines the estate. We wanted something that felt like a premium boutique hotel website - considered typography, generous white space, restrained colour palette - but grounded in the rural, historical identity of the place.

We chose a pairing of two typefaces that set the tone across the whole site: Cormorant Garamond, a refined serif used for headings and pull quotes, and Jost, a clean geometric sans-serif for body copy and navigation. The combination gives the site a dual character - traditional and contemporary at once - which felt right for an estate that is both genuinely historic and thoughtfully modernised.

The homepage hero section leads with a full-screen photograph and a slow Ken Burns zoom on load, giving an immediate sense of scale and atmosphere. Below it, the welcome section, split-screen Pembrokeshire feature, testimonials and history strip work through the narrative of the estate in a way that feels unhurried and confident.

Every template was built from scratch in Razor and C# within Umbraco, with a full suite of custom page types - homepage, property listing, individual property pages, Pembrokeshire guide, experiences, about, contact and a standard text page for legal content. The site is fully responsive and built mobile-first, with particular care given to the property pages, gallery overlays and booking sidebar at smaller screen sizes.

Part Two: Guesty API Integration

The technical centrepiece of the project was the Guesty integration. Guesty is a professional property management system that sits at the heart of the client's entire operation - syncing availability, pricing and content across every booking channel they use. Our task was to connect the new website to the same data source, so that the website became simply another output of the information already being maintained in Guesty.

The integration works via the Guesty Open API. We built a PHP proxy layer hosted on a separate Linux server, which handles authentication with the Guesty API using OAuth2 token management, caches tokens appropriately to stay within Guesty's rate limits, and exposes a clean endpoint that the website's front-end JavaScript can call. The property pages then fetch listing data from this proxy on load, parsing the JSON response and populating the page with real content: the property title, description, bedroom and bathroom counts, maximum occupancy, amenity list, pricing, check-in and check-out times, and the full set of listing photographs.

Custom fields in Guesty - specifically a website listing description field and a secondary property description field - give the client editorial control over the content that appears on the website, without it affecting the descriptions used on Airbnb or Booking.com. This was an important distinction: the website description needed to be crafted differently from the platform copy, but still managed entirely within Guesty.

The property photographs are served directly from Guesty's content delivery infrastructure via Cloudinary URLs embedded in the API response. This means a four-image gallery strip on each property page, a full-screen overlay gallery showing every listing image, and a hero photograph - all loaded from the same source the client manages in their Guesty dashboard.

The Moment It All Came Together

The most satisfying moment of any integration project is the one where the client updates something in their system and watches it appear automatically on the website. For St Botolphs, that moment arrived shortly after launch when the client added a newly commissioned set of professional photographs to their Guesty listings. Within seconds of the upload completing in Guesty, the images were live on the website - appearing in the hero, the gallery strip and the full overlay gallery across all property pages, without a single change being made to the website itself.

The photographs were, frankly, stunning. The estate had invested seriously in the shoot, and the results showed. Seeing them appear instantly and automatically across the new site - displayed in the gallery layouts we'd built to show them at their best - was exactly the kind of moment that makes this work genuinely rewarding. The client was delighted, and rightly so.

The Booking Experience

Each property page features a booking sidebar that links directly to the client's Guesty Booking Engine - a dedicated direct booking platform that sits outside the commission structure of Airbnb and Booking.com. The Book Now button on each property page deep-links to that specific listing on the booking engine, taking the visitor directly to the availability calendar for the property they're viewing. 

Property information in the booking sidebar - check-in and check-out times, minimum stay, pricing - is pulled live from the API, so it always reflects whatever the client has set in Guesty.

The Result

St Botolphs launched with a website that genuinely matches the quality of the estate it represents. The design holds its own against any premium holiday let website in the market, while the Guesty integration means the client has exactly what they asked for from the outset: a website that takes care of itself. Update a description, change a price, upload new photographs - it all flows through automatically.

It was a pleasure to work on. The combination of considered visual design, careful front-end development and a technically interesting API integration made for a project that used the full range of what we do at Metcalf Media. The client was a joy to work with throughout, and the estate itself - its history, its grounds, its properties - made every creative decision an interesting one.

If you're looking for a website that connects directly to your property management system, booking platform or any other live data source, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch for a free, no-obligation conversation about your project.