High Water

The brief asked for a coffee-shop website at Hampton Court at award standard, and nothing else: no name, no shop, no menu, no pictures. So the work started with the shop. Where it would sit, what it would serve, what it would be called, and only then what the site would do.

Two short searches confirmed what the field rewards in coffee right now. One strong idea per site. Interaction that explains the product (origin, roast, brewing) rather than decorates it. Narrow palettes: one dark, one light, one accent. The decisions that followed were as much about what to leave out: no loader counting to 100, no scroll-jacking beyond one pinned section, and no royal devices at all. No crowns, no gold, no heraldry. The palace is present through brick, water, the clock and the maze.

The astronomical clock on Anne Boleyn's Gate was installed in 1540, designed by Nicholas Kratzer and made by Nicholas Oursian. Among its dials it shows the hour the moon crosses the meridian, and from that the time of high water at London Bridge, which the court used to time the barge to London. A coffee counter that runs on its own smaller clocks (28 seconds on a shot, 3:40 on a filter, 93 °C in the kettle) borrows the idea without borrowing a crown. The name also reads plainly: it is next to the river, and coffee is mostly water. Secondary line: Coffee · Hampton Court.

Rejected on the way: Clock Court, a real place inside the palace that reads as official; Tiltyard, because the Tiltyard Café exists; Privy, unfortunate in British English; Wilderness, generic.

The shop: twenty-two seats in a brick store on the Barge Walk, the towpath along the river boundary of Home Park, between the palace wall and the water and outside the ticket line, so it serves people who are not visiting the palace at all. Four origins on the counter (Colombia Huila, Ethiopia Guji, Kenya Nyeri AA, Guatemala Huehuetenango), single-dosed, weighed, rested, one grinder per coffee. Open seven days: Monday to Friday 07.30 to 17.00, weekends 08.00 to 17.30.

The mark is five coffee beans arranged as a Tudor rose, five smaller beans between them for the inner rose, and a dot at the centre. Monoline, stroke only, so it embosses and survives at 16px. It is drawn from geometry in a Python script rather than in a drawing app: each bean is four cubic segments and an S-curve crease, the outer ring at 0.29 of the box and the inner at 0.155, so the file can be regenerated at any weight. Clear space is half the mark's width; below 20px the favicon cut drops the dot and thickens the stroke.

The wordmark is HIGH WATER in Cormorant Garamond at weight 500, tracked +0.06em, shaped with HarfBuzz and outlined with fontTools so the SVG carries real kerning and needs no font installed. COFFEE · HAMPTON COURT sits beneath in Space Grotesk under a hairline. A second cut at weight 620 is used at navigation size so the thin strokes survive at 14px. Lockups horizontal and stacked, on transparent and on parchment.

Proportion: obsidian 70, parchment 18, Thames 8, brick 4. Brick is a material, not a decoration. It appears as photographed Tudor brickwork, as the bag for coffee No. 1 and as the pin on the map, and in type only at large sizes. Contrast was measured against obsidian rather than assumed: parchment 14.6:1, parchment dim 8.6:1, brick light 5.3:1, brick 3.6:1, which is why brick is kept for large text and rules. Parchment on the Thames field is 9.1:1.

Cormorant Garamond for display, headings and numbers, at weight 500 with the italic at 400 for emphasis. It was chosen over GT Sectra because the licence is SIL OFL and the italic is better than most Garamond revivals at this size. Space Grotesk for body, interface and metadata, 400 for text and 500 for labels, chosen over Neue Haas Grotesk for the same licence reason; its slightly odd shapes keep the sans from reading as a template.

Both are variable fonts subset to Latin-1 plus typographic punctuation and self-hosted as WOFF2: 60, 45 and 25 KB. Display runs clamp(3.6rem, 9.5vw, 11.5rem), headings clamp(2.3rem, 4.4vw, 4.8rem), body 1 to 1.125rem, metadata 11px in caps tracked 0.12 to 0.18em.

There is no shop to photograph. Twelve stills were generated through Higgsfield with GPT Image 2.6 at 2K, prompted as 35mm film: Kodak Portra 400 rated at 200, Cinestill 800T for the dusk exterior, natural light only, muted colour, shallow focus, no faces and no signage. They were submitted in three waves of four, every result reviewed at 1000px with hands and food checked at crops, and nothing re-rolled. The maze still was generated and held back: one hedge was enough.

The hero is a five-second Kling 3.0 clip grown from the counter still with a locked-off camera, only the steam and the river moving, encoded as H.264 and VP9 with a 960px cut for phones. The first cut was a palindrome, so the steam ran back into the machine. It was replaced on 8 November with a ten-second clip: the steam from its first four seconds is isolated and laid twice, half a cycle apart, over the steam-free background, giving a four-second loop in which the steam only ever rises. Prompts and job ids are logged in the project; prompts and job ids are logged in the project.

Generated imagery is not photography and is labelled as such on the site and on this page. If High Water ever opened, a real shoot would replace all of it.

Cormorant Garamond by Christian Thalmann and Space Grotesk by Florian Karsten, both SIL OFL 1.1. GSAP (Webflow) and Lenis (darkroom.engineering). Stills and film generated with GPT Image 2.6 and Kling 3.0 through Higgsfield. The clock facts are from Historic Royal Palaces and Simon Thurley's Hampton Court Palace (1996). Research notes, prompts and job ids are in the project's docs.

Everything about High Water is fictional: the shop, the address, the telephone number (an Ofcom drama-range number that cannot connect), the prices and the seat counts. It is not affiliated with Historic Royal Palaces. The site says so in its footer.