Uptown Palmela — a site for a creative community
Building a small site for friends turning a 1961 wine cooperative in Palmela into a creative community of artist studios.
The first time I walked into the building, I laughed out loud.
Six enormous concrete wine tanks, sitting up on stilts like something out of a sci-fi film, in the middle of a 1961 cooperative that nobody had touched in a while. My friend Inês had been telling me about it for weeks — “you have to see it, Dorian, you won’t believe it” — and she was right. I didn’t believe it until I was standing under one of those tanks with my head tilted back, trying to imagine a painter working inside it.
That’s the building. 289 m² in Palmela, about forty minutes south of Lisbon. Three levels. Six elevated tanks becoming artist studios. A mezzanine walkway above them. A double-height communal space underneath. And a roof that had just been redone the year before, which was the only reason any of this was possible.
Inês and a few others were turning it into a creative community — maker studios, movement spaces, a kitchen studio, a tea room, the whole thing. They needed a small site. “Nothing fancy,” she said. “Just something that feels like the building.” I said yes before she finished the sentence.
The design brief, in one sentence
Heritage plus creative. That was it.
Which in practice meant: no trendy startup aesthetic. No dark-mode gradient hero with a glowing CTA. No “we’re disrupting creative real estate” energy. This is a place with concrete walls from 1961 and tanks that used to hold wine. The site had to feel like that — warm stones, earth tones, a lot of breathing room.
I pulled two colors out of the building itself. A burnt orange for the rust and the Portuguese tile — #C8654A. A muted blue for the sky you see through the skylights — #7A9AB5. Then a lot of stone and off-white around them. Image-forward, quiet layouts, generous white space. If the building is the hero, the site should get out of the way.
Why Svelte 5 and Tailwind v4 for something like this
I’ll admit part of the answer is “because I wanted to”. These are the tools I’m reaching for on everything this year, and building for friends is the fastest way to stay sharp on a stack without the pressure of a production system.
But there’s a real reason too. Svelte’s shape — no runtime unless you actually need one — fits image-heavy content sites almost perfectly. Most of Uptown Palmela is text, photos, and a floorplan. It doesn’t need hydration theatre. It needs to load fast on a phone in a café in Palmela, look beautiful, and get out of the way.
Tailwind v4 with the Vite plugin is the fastest I’ve ever iterated on a design. And Cloudflare Pages means I can push from my laptop and have the site live globally in about forty seconds, for free. For a five-page site being handed to friends, that’s the whole package.
Five pages in the end: home, floorplan, location, vision, contact. Svelte 5 runes for the little bits of interactivity. Zero JS where I could help it.
The part I didn’t expect
Building a site for friends is different. I kept catching myself worrying about details that nobody would ever notice — the exact weight of the stone background behind the hero, whether the orange accent was warm enough, the spacing around the floorplan on mobile. Not because it mattered technically. Because it was going to be theirs.
It’s a different kind of care than client work. Or sndev.io work. It’s quieter. You’re not trying to prove anything. You’re just trying to make something that feels right for people you like.
I’m still tweaking things. Inês sends me photos from the building and I go add another image to the gallery. Someone mentions the tea room should feel more like stillness and I change a margin. It’s the slowest kind of shipping — and also the most fun I’ve had on a side project in a while.
I keep thinking about that first visit. Standing under the tank, looking up, laughing. That’s the feeling I wanted the homepage to have.
I hope it does.
-D