Albion Nord

Albion Nord is a London interior design practice working across residential, development and hospitality interior architecture, with an in-house furniture line built around skilled British makers and an online shop of curated antiques and found objects sourced from auction houses and antique fairs across the UK and Europe.

The work runs on a single belief, in the practice's own words: that the most beautiful spaces are those with soul. The same care goes into a country estate and an artisan-crafted coffee table.

A step in the right direction

The first message arrived in 2023, from Laura Bowen, then studio manager. "We are an interior design studio with an online shop that is currently on Wordpress," it read. "However, we believe it would be a great step in the right direction to migrate this to Shopify." The shop had grown. The Makers Line, the practice's furniture collection produced with British craftspeople, was in production. The Collectors Edit, an evolving online catalogue of antiques and objects sourced across Europe, was filling out. The WordPress and WooCommerce setup that had carried the original site was straining under the load, particularly with the oversize, made-to-order and specialist pieces now part of the regular inventory. They wanted a quote, and a better platform.

Two solutions, one site

Our usual instinct would have been to keep everything on a single platform. Splitting a business across two stacks adds complexity, and a customer can fall through the join. Albion Nord, though, were happy with WordPress for the practice's content, the projects, the journal, the services pages, and the strain was specifically on the e-commerce. The shop needed the brute strength and robustness of Shopify; the rest of the site did not. So rather than rebuild what already worked, we used the right tool for each job and packaged both into a single experience. To an Albion Nord customer, it is one site, navigable end to end without thinking about it. Behind the scenes, two solutions doing what they each do best.

ALbion Nord E-Commerce Web Design & Build

DESIGNING FOR GROWTH WITH SHOPIFY 2.0

Where cost and time are key factors in a project, we will often work with clients to select a pre-existing Shopify 2.0 theme which already includes key features and functionality required by the brief.

Working within Albion Nord’s established brand palette, we settled on an appropriate theme and set about the process of translating their design language into a rich and fully-formed e-commerce journey. Taking cues from their elegant classicism, warm tones and modern, tactile approach, the resulting site feels restful, assured and welcoming; a place where the customer is invited to browse, to linger, and to soak up the elegant atmosphere of tradition, craft and quality.

Warm, textural product imagery was carefully curated to add depth and a sense of space to pages across the site, while engaging video content was added to tell the story of the Albion Nord collections, and their focus and respect for craftsmanship.