Note: Lumière Estate is a portfolio project, not client work. It was built to answer a specific technical question: how do you build a real estate platform that feels premium and editorial, instead of like one of a thousand generic property listing sites?
The challenge
Most real estate platforms treat filtering and display as separate concerns: a map view here, a list view there, often with noticeable lag switching between them. For a luxury real estate platform, that's a problem — the target audience expects a smooth, high-end experience, not loading spinners.
The technical approach
Interactive map with Leaflet. Instead of a generic Google Maps embed, Leaflet was chosen for more control over styling, marker clustering, and performance when displaying many properties at once.
TanStack Query for data management. Changing filters (price range, location, property type) doesn't trigger full page reloads. Results are cached and refreshed in the background instead — the experience feels instant rather than a wait.
Framer Motion for editorial transitions. Page transitions and property presentations use deliberate animation to create the "editorial" feel you'd associate with glossy magazines — but sparingly enough not to distract from the actual content.
Booking widget as a self-contained component. Viewing requests are built as an isolated, reusable component — testable and swappable independently from the rest of the page.
What the project demonstrates
That complex, interactive filtering logic doesn't have to come at the cost of performance or design, as long as data management and animation are considered from the start — not bolted on afterward.
Why it matters
Every technical choice above maps onto a number a real agency would care about:
Instant filtering, no loading spinner between map and list, protects lead volume directly. In real estate, a slow filter is a lead who alt-tabs to the next listing site while the page thinks — no A/B test needed to know that costs conversions.
Editorial presentation over a generic listing grid is a trust signal that arrives before the first phone call. In the luxury segment, the site itself has to justify the price point — a template-feeling site undercuts the pitch before a word is exchanged.
The booking widget built as an isolated component means it can be swapped for a real CRM or scheduling backend later without rebuilding the page around it — lower integration cost if this were wired into an actual agency's operations.
This is a portfolio project, so there's no real lead-conversion data behind these claims. But they're the specific, checkable metrics I'd instrument from day one on a live version of this: time-to-first-filter-result, booking completion rate, and bounce rate on listing pages.
View the live demo · Code on GitHub
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