A promotional advertisement for a company called MORRO.

Morro

Bringing self-serve booking to a story-led rental brand, while keeping the human sales experience that sets it apart.

Morro rents all-inclusive apartments across London, Guildford and Boston, to tenants who expect a story-led, personal service. Its sister brand Scape runs automated self-serve booking at scale; Morro set out to bring that same convenience to its tenants in its own way.

Renting a home is a significant financial commitment, and Morro’s team builds the trust those decisions depend on in person. Self-serve had to strengthen that experience, not replace it. We were engaged to bring self-serve search and booking to life, and to build the platform behind it.

Visit site
A collage of various website designs and promotional materials for different properties.

Two routes, one platform

Self-serve conversion and the human sales route, side by side on every property page.

A search-led journey can let users bypass property pages entirely, skipping the storytelling that makes a brand what it is. Morro’s experience leads with the brand instead: visitors move from location to property page, where the narrative lands first, and the transactional route sits within that journey rather than headlining the navigation. On every property page, “Check availability” and “Book a tour” sit side by side — tenants who want a person still get one, and tenants ready to commit can act on the spot.

Our work made both routes real on one platform. Booking now happens in the moment: the primary path is direct, with the enquiry route still there for anyone who wants a conversation first.

A real estate listing for a medium studio apartment in Walthamstow, London, UK.
A calendar interface for selecting a move-in date in August 2026.
A mobile application interface displaying details about an apartment booking.

Customization within system constraints

Re-engineering generic booking components into a premium interface that feels native to the brand.

The shared booking engine arrived with functional but generic components: date pickers and pricing grids that were never designed with Morro’s visual identity in mind. We rebuilt them to the design system, engineering the interaction until the third-party layer reads as a native part of the site rather than an embed.

The features that do most for user confidence got the deepest engineering: side-by-side room comparison, so prospective tenants can evaluate layouts dynamically, and availability filtering wired directly into the core search infrastructure for instant updates. Search runs on Algolia, extended so tenants can sort live inventory by price and location across the portfolio.

A promotional advertisement for a "Medium" studio apartment.
A logo for "The ALBA Mulberry Walk London" displayed on a dark green background.

Impact

A premium digital journey and a direct booking engine, running side by side on one platform.

Morro now operates self-serve search and booking with live availability, room comparison and native booking end to end. By adapting Scape’s proven architecture with strict brand-level separation, each brand’s inventory stays distinct while both run on one engine — an experience tailored to Morro’s audience in its own right.

The enquiry route now works as a supporting channel for complex queries, while “Book a tour” keeps the human sales conversation open for tenants who want it. The platform has continued to grow since launch, with search and booking features deepening as the product matures, and the flexibility to extend without disruption designed in from the start.

Jul 2026

One of the 214 hand-drawn sheets of Inō’s map of Japan, and his team surveying Mitarai in 1806

Measure

In 1800 a retired sake brewer named Inō Tadataka set out to walk Japan’s coast. He spent 17 years and 35,000 km on foot, and died before the work was done. His team finished the first accurate map of Japan in 1821, and it stayed in use for a century.

Jun 2026

William Badcock, A Touch-stone for Gold and Silver Wares (1677)

Hallmark

The word hallmark comes from an actual hall, Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where since 1300 silver has been tested against the sterling standard and struck with the hall’s mark, so you could trust it without knowing the maker.

May 2026

Alan Kay: His Sketches, Piano, and Computer

Notes

A note can be a written record, a struck key, or the act of noticing, and each sharpens how we understand the world. A piano is an instrument, but also a technology built on the notes it makes possible.

Apr 2026

Photographs of a red cloth bound travel handbook from 1894. The book is open to show pages with maps and illustrations.

Change

A red cloth spine caught my eye in a Tokyo bookshop last week. A handbook for travellers in Japan, fourth edition, 1894. I was 132 years late, yet most of what it describes still stands.

Mar 2026

Screenshots from the development process of the new ON release notes page

Taking the temperature

You walk into a room and you can feel it. Whether there is energy or not. We describe someone as warm. We talk about things cooling down. Temperature is something we sense before we have words for it.

Feb 2026

Pixelised image of a horse running

Rethinking video, prototyping faster, and encoding brand logic

In Japanese, the character for hand is 手. Joined with the character for craft, it becomes 手仕事 (teshigoto), or handwork.

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