Million Dollar Luxe
Million Dollar Luxe rents private villas across Los Angeles, from Beverly Hills and Bel Air out to Malibu, and backs every stay with a concierge team that handles the chef, the driver and everything in between. Their guests expect a certain level of polish, and the design matched it: big photography, a quiet palette, and a lot of white space doing a lot of work.
A design like that depends on the details, so my main goal was to build exactly what was designed. Instead of eyeballing the build against screenshots, I measured it. The tooling in our build process reads the Figma file directly and pulls out the exact position and size of every element. A script then opens the built page in a real browser and checks that each one landed where the design says it should, at desktop and very wide screens alike. On the villa page alone that came to 22 checks, and they all had to pass before a section was done. Mobile layouts and the editor view got the same treatment, so what the client sees while editing matches what visitors see.
Design files are made by people, so they’re not always laid out with machine precision. A background might be drawn as a separate shape behind a section, or a photo might run off the edge of the frame. Each time the process ran into one of these, we added it to the checklist, so the next build catches it automatically. The photography came straight out of the design file automatically at full resolution, so what the client approved is what visitors get.
Of note on the front end, the homepage carousel mixes portrait, landscape and square images in a set rhythm and loops forever without a visible seam. Getting there took a surprising amount of digging into how the slider library recycles slides. The destinations mosaic keeps its exact proportions at any screen width, so the tiles always have the aspect ratio intended by the designer. The site is also fast for something this image-heavy: every page we tested scored an A on GTmetrix at launch, with desktop performance between 99 and 100.
Behind the scenes, MDL was the project most of our new deployment testing was built and proven on. Every release now goes to staging first. There, an automated suite crawls every page in the sitemap, checks for JavaScript errors, and compares screenshots at four screen sizes against approved versions. It also holds the site to performance and accessibility budgets before production is touched. It caught real problems before the client ever saw them, including a navigation menu that disappeared from every page after a shared code update. None of that shows up in a screenshot, but it’s why the site will still look the way it was designed a year from now.
The photos do most of the selling here. My job was to make sure nothing got in their way.
