Ashfield Student Living: one hero, two audiences, and a bill splitter that tells the truth
Concept build. Ashfield Student Living is an invented firm. This was made to show how we approach a property brief, so nothing here is a client result and no figure describes a real business.
The brief we set ourselves
An agency letting and managing 80 student houses across Lenton, Dunkirk and Beeston, talking to two audiences in the same document: the group of students choosing next year's house, and the parents or guarantors who end up actually reading the tenancy agreement. Most sites in this category write one tone and hope it stretches. We didn't think it would.
The brief we set ourselves was to let the students' section be direct and funny-adjacent without trying too hard, and to give the parents' section its own calmer register rather than a watered-down copy of the student version, including saying plainly what joint and several guarantor liability means, not softening it into "supportive community."
What we built
A neo-brutalist poster hero: four hard-edged colour blocks (coral, teal, mustard and a street photograph) stacked and deliberately offset, with the headline set large enough to physically cross two or three block boundaries and invert colour at each crossing. No centred type, no left-text-right-image hero.
Beneath it, a pinned section turns vertical scroll into horizontal movement through a track of the houses, so scrolling down reads as walking down a real street, one house at a time. Below 900px, or under reduced motion, the track drops the pin and lays the houses out as an ordinary vertical stack with the same content. Trebuchet MS carries the display type at genuinely extreme scale contrast against Verdana body copy, which stays legible where the ledger's fine print needs it to.
The bill splitter
The signature interaction is a ledger, not a pricing table. Drag the housemate count from three to eight, toggle which bills are included (gas and electric, water, broadband, TV licence, contents cover), and the per-person weekly figure recomputes instantly in large tabular numerals. Numbers snap rather than ease, because the point is that this is arithmetic, not a sales pitch.
The fair-use cap is stated in the same breath as the headline offer, not buried three sections down: "bills included" means a cap per person per bill category, and usage above it is measured and split across the house. The annual total and the 51-week contract length sit next to the weekly figure rather than being left out of view.
Details that did the work
- The parents' section runs in a distinct, calmer teal panel and says outright that any one guarantor can be asked for the full amount, not just their share
- Bin night and council-fine consequences stated as fact, not house rules dressed up as advice
- Every focus ring is a solid outline with an offset, checked against all four background colours in use so it never disappears on a saturated fill
- The housemate slider has a bound number input alongside it, for anyone who can't or doesn't want to drag
Where it stands
Audited at 87 out of 100 across usability, uniqueness, beauty and freedom from generic AI patterns. The honest weakness is the hero: the right-hand column, strong at the top where the stats sit, empties out badly further down the block stack. That's the first thing a second pass would fix.