Crabtree & Crabtree

The client

A premier high-end property agency, Crabtree & Crabtree manages a portfolio of over 370 luxurious and unique holiday homes. They have built a formidable reputation for delivering a bespoke, high-quality experience for their visitors.

For years, they have been the benchmark in the industry – we’d lost count of sales enquiries from other businesses who pointed to Crabtree & Crabtree as the company that simply ‘gets it right’. They came to us because they knew their digital presence needed to finally match the impeccable standards of their physical properties and customer care.

The challenge

With a huge range of properties, the website had to provide an absolutely seamless user experience. However, the beauty of the Crabtree portfolio, its sheer scale and diversity, presented a technical hurdle. Their existing website had some pain points; it was difficult to navigate, and finding the ‘perfect escape’ had become a chore for the user.

The brand needed a digital home that felt visually elegant but functional and intuitive. It had to balance a lightweight, high-end aesthetic with the heavy lifting required to manage hundreds of live listings and complex SuperControl integrations. Beyond just looking the part, the site had to work hard to retain their elite search engine rankings while opening up new markets for direct bookings.

Alongside the core property search, we needed to find a way to make their accompanying content shine. This meant creating a digital home for the Crabtree & Crabtree Little Black Book, a fabulous directory of activities designed to give potential guests a real flavour of the bespoke experience awaiting them.

The result

We restructured the entire site architecture, focusing on a multi-layered, thoughtfully designed search and navigation system. Property and collection pages were redesigned to provide at-a-glance information, allowing the stunning photography and videography to do the talking.

The real ‘secret sauce’ happened under the hood. To solve the massive administrative burden the team faced, we utilised Atom, our proprietary system designed and developed in-house at our Lockerbie studio.

Finally, we brought the Crabtree & Crabtree ‘Little Black Book’ to life online. This curated directory of local activities and hidden gems transformed the site from a simple booking engine into a lifestyle destination. The result is a platform that doesn’t just showcase properties; it upholds the gold standard of Crabtree hospitality.