Martin Kemp Design + Sothebys International Realty UK

Our strategy and philosophy begins with understanding the fundamental drivers behind each brand: values, tone, audience and the emotion they seek to evoke. From this foundation, we craft luxury web design environments that transcend functionality, translating brand essence into digital form with user needs paramount.

Luxury web design combines technical excellence with refined visual language, creating digital brand experiences where prestige is felt rather than stated and sophisticated audiences discover brands that understand modern luxury.

We design, build and tailor experiences to inform and inspire, offering interactions that feel effortless, premium and outcome-focused. Applications are conceived with the same precision: intuitive in flow, elegant in detail, designed to create meaningful engagement whilst maintaining visual coherence across every touchpoint.

Our digital design methodology prioritises user experience architecture that anticipates needs, designing navigation flows, interaction patterns and content hierarchies that guide visitors seamlessly through brand narratives.

Felix&Friends develops headless website platforms characterised by performance, flexibility and visual refinement, implementing responsive design that adapts elegantly whilst maintaining the sophistication expected by premium audiences.

Digital brand experiences must convey distinction without overt selling, creating environments where refined typography guides attention, imagery evokes emotion and every element serves strategic purpose.

Our UX and UI design expertise ensures luxury websites balance aesthetic impact with functional excellence, optimising loading performance, implementing smooth animations and creating interfaces that enhance rather than distract.

A brand app earns its place on a phone if it does something a website cannot. For most of our clients, that is most likely a specific and immediate service. From making a booking (a table or a treatment), managing membership, following a residence through construction or reaching a residents' concierge. We define the role of the app precisely from the outset, ensuring it doesn’t simply repeat functionality of the adjacent website and offers a richer, faster and more detailed user experience.

Felix&Friends designs and develops apps for iOS and Android with the same visual and editorial care we bring to luxury brands. Our app knowledge draws on a long experience in hospitality, members clubs, branded residences and premium retail. That experience matters because the hardest questions in an app project sit beneath the screens. How do we make the content rich enough for repeat users to see a benefit and integrate it into their lives regularly? This starts with what a user will want and expect to see the moment they open the app to avoid any friction and ensure a smooth onboarding and fast human integration.

For users, the standard is set by the best apps on their phone, whatever the category. New customers expect speed, privacy and discretion and they notice when an app asks for too much of them too soon. We design for the moments that count, such as arriving, booking, paying and asking for help and keep everything else out of the way. Whether we build natively or cross-platform depends on what those moments demand, the budget available and the immediate and future plans for the app.

Premium apps also depend heavily on the systems behind them. We integrate any third-party booking integration with the app, including CRM and membership databases, e-commerce and payment gateways, loyalty programmes and property management systems, so the app becomes a working part of the business and for the users. Personalisation and push notifications are designed with the user in mind ensuring well-timed messaging to a customer becomes useful and helpful and not an annoyance.

For residential developments and branded residences, we create resident and owner apps for concierge requests, amenity booking, building communications and access. These carry the brand experience well beyond the sales campaign and into daily life in the building.

Luxury buyers increasingly start their research by asking an AI assistant. Someone looking for a branded residence in Dubai, a private members club in London or a jeweller for a private commission may now get a short, synthesised answer from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity or Gemini, with a handful of sources cited.

Felix&Friends helps brands become one of those sources.

Generative engine optimisation builds on the foundations of good SEO. Pages still need to be fast, crawlable and well structured. They need clear heading hierarchies, accurate metadata, and schema markup that tells machines what a brand is, what it offers and where it operates. Those foundations matter more now, because AI systems favour content they can read and attribute with confidence.

What earns a citation is substance. AI models tend to quote content that answers a question directly, makes specific claims that can be checked, and comes from a source with evident expertise. We help brands write that way. That means setting out a clear point of view early on each page, naming projects, places and people, stating key facts consistently across the site, and building pages around the questions their audiences actually ask. Done well, it reads as good editorial writing, which is what a luxury brand should be publishing anyway.

Authority is also built away from the website. AI systems weigh what others say about a brand, so we work on the signals beyond it: coverage in respected publications, accurate directory and listing profiles, and consistent descriptions across LinkedIn, partner sites and industry platforms. A brand described the same way in twenty credible places is much easier for a model to recommend.

We measure visibility where it now happens. Alongside search rankings and organic traffic, we track how often a brand is mentioned and cited in AI answers to a defined set of prompts that matter to its business. We also track how it is described and which competitors appear alongside it. The findings shape the content plan, and the measure of success stays the same: qualified enquiries from the right audience.

For luxury brands, social media can often be where new customers first discover the name or product, and where existing users see updates on new product launches, service ranges or brand events. All are watching for different reasons to believe in the brand and whether they align to the product or offer.

We build social strategy from the brand positioning outwards. That means defining what each channel is for, who it serves and which editorial territories the brand can credibly own. Instagram usually carries the visual identity, the product and the place. LinkedIn suits property, financial services and trade audiences such as agents, investors and partners. Pinterest and YouTube reward brands with a strong design or craft story.

From there, we develop content pillars, a social tone of voice, visual guidelines and a publishing calendar built around the brand's real moments: launches, openings, collections, seasons and events. Content is produced through photography, film, motion and editorial copy, in the formats that perform today, from Reels and carousels to short-form video. Collaborations with designers, chefs, architects and like-minded brands extend reach into audiences that matter. Paid social is planned alongside organic, with tight targeting and creative made for each placement.

Every programme is measured. Monthly reporting covers reach, engagement quality, saves and shares, audience growth and, above all, the traffic, enquiries and sales social actually drives. The analysis goes straight back into the plan.

Launch is the point at which a website or app starts to work for a business. It is also the point at which it requires sustained attention. Security threats increase, integrations change, and the business and brand continue to develop. Felix&Friends provides aftercare for organisations that run complex, business-critical websites, web applications and mobile apps and want one accountable partner after go-live. Every arrangement is scoped to the platform, the sector and the budget.

Hypercare after launch. Every project includes a hypercare period after launch. The team that built the platform monitors performance, errors and user behaviour closely and resolves issues as a priority. The length of the period depends on the complexity of the launch and the project budget. It can be extended for phased or high-risk launches. Hypercare ends when the platform is stable and the client confirms it is ready for ongoing support.

Warranty. Each project includes a warranty period during which Felix and Friends correct defects in delivered functionality at no charge. A defect is a failure of the platform to work as specified.

Onboarding and handover into support. Before hypercare ends, the delivery team hands over to the client’s support team. The handover covers architecture, environments, integrations, known issues and release procedures, so that support begins with full knowledge of the platform. Contacts, escalation routes and reporting are confirmed before ongoing support starts.

Flexible support. Support is available as a monthly retainer, a pre-agreed set of hours or on a per-incident basis. Retainers suit platforms where predictable cost and guaranteed response matter. Hour banks suit variable demand. Per-incident support suits lower-risk sites. The model is agreed with each client according to risk and budget.

Service levels. Support retainers come with agreed response and resolution times, prioritised by severity. A fault affecting bookings, sales or enquiries is handled at a higher urgency from a minor content fix and our SLAs reflect this. You have a named account manager and direct access to the team who built the platform when needed.

Hosting, security and compliance. We manage or advise on hosting, CDN, SSL, backups and uptime monitoring, with regular security patching for frameworks, plugins and dependencies. We also offer support for ongoing technical compliance with UK privacy, EU GDPR and international cookie regulation standards.

Website and App maintenance. Apple and Google release major operating system updates every year and their store policies change frequently. We can test and update apps against each release, manage store submissions, developer accounts and certificates, and keep third-party integrations running as partner APIs evolve.

Continuous improvement. The best platforms keep developing after launch. Each quarter, we can review analytics, conversion, Core Web Vitals, SEO and AI visibility to assess progress against the goals set at launch and plan for a prioritised roadmap of enhancements, features and campaign work. Retained development hours can be used flexibly across all of it.

Training, documentation and ownership. Your team is trained on the CMS and app admin tools before launch, and receives full documentation if agreed. You own your content and data at all times. Ownership of bespoke code transfers to you on final payment. Third-party components remain subject to their own licences. On request, we provide a documented handover so that the platform can move to another provider without disruption.

Reporting. Monthly reports cover uptime, tickets raised and resolved, updates applied and performance against agreed KPIs. Support is tailored to each platform, from essential maintenance to a fully retained digital team.