The entrance to 180 The Thames on Temple Place

Five brands, one system.

A hotel, a café, a bar, a health club and a grocer. Every one has its own website. They all run on the same set of parts.

← Back to all work

The situation

180 The Thames is a building on Temple Place with a lot of names in it. St. Clement is the hotel. Café Clement and Bobbi's Bar are where you eat and drink. There's a health club, and Corner Shop London on the corner.

Each one needed a website that looked like itself, and Ben Prescott Designs had already set the design language for the group. My job was to carry it across all of them without flattening any of them.

Five separate builds would have meant five codebases to keep patched, and a fix that lands on one site and gets forgotten on the other four. Nobody in the building is a developer, either, so it also had to be safe to edit by the people who run each venue.

What was done

They all run on one WordPress installation and one shared theme, built to BPD's guidelines. Type, spacing, grid and behaviour come from the same place. A page on the health club site and a page on the hotel site are made of identical parts.

What changes is the content and a short list of per-site settings: photography, logo, colour, menus, words. None of it needs a developer.

Write a fix once, deploy it once, and every site has it that afternoon.

Three rules the system is built on

  • Shared parts, own character

    Every page is built from the same small set of blocks. Corner Shop looks nothing like the hotel, and underneath it's the same machine.

  • Hard to break

    The blocks only take what they're designed for. There's no free-form layout to get wrong, so the team can change words and pictures without the design coming apart.

  • One update, everywhere

    One deploy reaches every site. Fifty of them would be the same afternoon's work as five.

The brands on it

Same system underneath. The pictures, the colour and the words are what tell them apart.

What that buys

5

brands running from a single WordPress installation

1

shared theme behind all of them, deployed from one place

Counted from the live installation, September 2026.

What the work covers

The shared WordPress theme, the blocks the team edits with, and the deployment that ships them. Hosting on WP Engine. Booking and reservations wired in through SiteMinder and SevenRooms, and email sign-up through dailypoint. Ongoing development and maintenance across the group, on retainer.

It started in late 2024 and hasn't stopped since.

Who did what

The design language for 180 The Thames is Ben Prescott Designs' work. The system that carries it is mine: the WordPress multisite, the shared theme, the blocks, the editing experience and the deployment.

Running more than one brand?

If you've got a family of sites that keep drifting apart, get in touch.

Get in touch