Tropical London
Tropical London
Rebuilding a South East London resto-lounge's website into a fast, CMS-managed Next.js experience.
- Role
- Front-end engineer
- Engagement
- Independent redesign
- Selected images
- 3
The opportunity
Tropical London needed a website that matched the energy of the venue itself — dining, cocktails, bottomless brunch, shisha and live music — without staff having to touch code every time the menu or events calendar changed.
The approach
I built the site with Next.js App Router and Tailwind CSS, giving each part of the experience — menu, events, private hire, gallery and contact — its own dedicated route. Framer Motion adds scroll reveals and light interaction without slowing the experience down.
Menu categories, events, gallery images and testimonials are modelled in
Sanity, a free-tier headless CMS, so staff can edit content directly from a
/studio route without a developer in the loop. The site ships with realistic
placeholder content so it renders correctly before any CMS account exists, and
switches over automatically once real content is added. The reservation form
posts to a configurable form endpoint, running in a safe demo mode until one is
connected.
Contribution
- Built the site with Next.js, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS.
- Modelled menu, events, gallery and testimonial content in Sanity CMS.
- Added Framer Motion scroll reveals and micro-interactions.
- Implemented a configurable reservation form with a safe placeholder mode.
Project gallery
Selected screens and project moments.
A dedicated menu route replaced scroll-anchor navigation with its own clear journey.
Events, private hire and gallery each became their own page rather than a single long scroll.