Café des Artistes — French Brasserie in the Thalia Theater
( Role )
Designer & Frontend Developer
( Scope )
- Design direction and the full build: the horizontally scrolled home page and its arch transitions
- The loader and route curtains
- All content pages
- The SIPSAQ booking embed
- Cookie consent
- German legal pages
( Stack )
- Next.js 16
- GSAP
- Lenis
- SIPSAQ booking
( Brief )
Café des Artistes serves French food from breakfast to dinner inside the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and on show nights it stays open until an hour after the curtain. The site had to feel like the room — marble, brass, arches, a bit of theatre — while answering what guests actually come for: the menus, the hours around the performance, and a table.
( Approach )
The home page plays like a performance. After a curtain-style loader, arch windows open on Le Café, La Brasserie and Le Théâtre; the middle arch grows to fill the screen and each chapter scrolls sideways while a script word glides along the bottom. Everything is built on the house look: marble grounds, double gold rules, Instrument Serif with italics and small mono labels. GSAP and Lenis drive the motion, with route transitions between pages.
Around it sit the menus — Speisekarte, Mittagskarte and Café et Gâteau — a page for theatre guests with the opening hours around each performance, news and events, press, wine recommendations, jobs and contact, plus online table booking through SIPSAQ embedded on the reservation page, cookie consent and German legal pages.
( Challenge )
The home page’s chapters scroll sideways inside a vertical page, with arches that grow into full-screen images — it had to stay smooth with Lenis and GSAP, wait for the loader and the route curtain before revealing anything, and still read well on a phone. Opening hours that depend on the theatre’s schedule also had to be written so guests understand them at a glance.
( Responsibilities )
Design direction and the full build: the horizontally scrolled home page and its arch transitions, the loader and route curtains, all content pages, the SIPSAQ booking embed, cookie consent, and German legal pages.
