Pistis Contracting
Client: boutique general contracting studio · GTA · luxury residential · 13 in-house trade specialties
Pistis is a GTA general contractor that builds heritage-grade homes for clients who care more about privacy and finish quality than about line-item pricing. They came to us looking for a site that would do two things: communicate the price bracket without ever putting a number on the page, and gently push the wrong leads out the door before they ever filled in the contact form.
The name is Greek for trust. Every line item, every change order, every walk-through gets measured against good faith at this studio, and we wanted the website to feel the same way.
One long scroll instead of five tabs
Most contractor sites are five-tab brochures where the visitor has to hunt for whatever they need. We built this one as a single continuous scroll through eleven sections, starting with trust and ending with the ask. Every section earns its place. Nothing is filler.
It sells before it asks for anything
Three pillar cards (One team. Only the best trades. We finish what we start.) sit right under the hero, so the visitor's first read is the studio's posture instead of a phone number. Pricing isn't mentioned anywhere on the page. The first CTA only shows up after we've walked through what trust looks like rendered in oak, stone, and light.
Two different audiences, one footer
"Got a project?" for the homeowner sits in the same grid as "Run a good crew?" for tradespeople looking for work. Both asks get equal type, equal weight, equal pixels, which means the tradesperson never feels like they're being routed to a careers page nobody updates. Both land in the studio inbox with a tag attached so the right person follows up.
Discretion is the actual feature
Above the recent projects we wrote one line: "A few recent projects. Names kept private." That single sentence tells the right buyer more about the price bracket than any number would, and the buyer who needs to see receipts and case studies up front quietly figures out this isn't their shop.
The photography carries the page
Wine cellars, home theatres, wellness suites, smart-home installs. The work is shot well, so the work does the selling. Captions stay short on purpose so the eye keeps moving down the page instead of bogging down on a marketing paragraph that wasn't going to convert anyone anyway.
Three typefaces, restraint everywhere else
Cormorant Garamond on the headlines (italic when we want to lean on a verb), Inter for the body, JetBrains Mono for small metadata. Warm cream, ink, and a single antique gold accent. The whole site reads like a magazine spread rather than a brochure, which is the point.
Anyone can put up a single-page Next.js site in a weekend. The difference between a $5K site and a $30K one shows up in three or four small craft decisions like the ones below, where the page does something specific so the right buyer feels at home and the wrong one quietly leaves on their own.
Getting the headline to hold on every screen
The hero reads "Trust, made tangible." with the second clause in italic. The hard part was keeping the italic from drifting off the optical baseline of the cap, which it tends to do in most serif italics. We used a font-feature-tuned italic of Cormorant Garamond at the same x-height as the roman cap, then cropped the hero image so the headline stays the loudest thing on the screen above 1280px and gracefully hands over to the photo below 768. No layout shift on the way down.
Thirteen trades without burying them in a dropdown
Thirteen line items in one section usually turns into a menu, which buries the answer to the exact question the homeowner showed up with. We rendered them as a three-column hairline grid with one uppercase line of context under each name. It has the density of a contents page in a hardcover book. You can read the whole thing in about three seconds, and it pre-answers most of the qualifying questions the studio would otherwise field on a call.
Putting the trade application next to the consultation form
Homeowners and tradespeople are two very different conversations, but most contractor sites stuff the trade form under a /careers route nobody visits. We gave both asks the same grid, the same type, the same screen real estate, so the tradesperson reading the site feels recruited and the homeowner reading the site feels like the studio is paying attention to who they hire as much as what they build. Neither audience feels like the afterthought.
// THE QUIET FILTER
Premium services have a price-discovery problem. If you put a number on the page you anchor against the cheaper competitors who'll always look like a better deal at a glance, and if you hide everything behind a discovery call you end up wasting your best people's time on tire-kickers. We built this page so the answer comes through the typography, the photography, the brand etymology, and that one "Names kept private" line under the recent projects. Visitors who can't afford the work tend to feel it before they ever click into the form.
The studio gets fewer leads. They close a higher percentage of them. The contracts are bigger. We'd rather that ratio than the opposite one.
// Why this build is portfolio-worthy
Most contractor websites are stock-photo brochures with a phone number in 14px Arial, and you can usually tell which agency template the build came from in about three seconds. We wanted Pistis to read more like a hardcover monograph that happens to live at a URL, where the typography, photography, and pacing do most of the work and the marketing copy stays out of the way.
It went from kickoff to live in days, which is the part we're proud of, but none of the usual "built fast" tells made it onto the page. No template seams, no stock illustrations, no five-row testimonial slider. The kind of build a buyer doesn't suspect was quick until you bring it up.