Golden Gate

The room has been open since 1991

Golden Gate sells ceramic and granite tiles, bathroom fittings and everything that goes between them, out of a showroom on Ulica Djokaj in Tuzi. The doors opened in 1991, the warehouse is round the back, and for three decades the catalogue was the room itself: you walked in, you were shown things, and you left knowing what a square metre costs.

The brief was to put that room online without pretending it is a different kind of business. Tiles are chosen by eye and bought by the pallet; a mixer tap is chosen by the millimetre. Both arrive in ranges that turn over with whatever the suppliers ship next. So the site had to carry six hundred products in a shape the showroom can keep true itself, in Serbian, on the phone somebody is holding while standing in a half-finished bathroom.

Gold, and how to keep it

The identity is a rounded frame in gold with the monogram set inside it, and a serif wordmark that can stand on its own once the frame has been seen. The mark is drawn in the current text colour, so it inverts with the theme; only the gold stays fixed, and that is what makes it read as the brand rather than as decoration.

Gold is a difficult colour to hold on a screen. It is written twice — a deep bronze on the light ground, a brighter leaf in the dark — so the accent is the same idea at both ends and legible at both, rather than one hex that flattens into beige on white.

Run by the showroom

Everything the public sees is edited in Montenegrin at /administracija, by people whose other job is standing in the showroom: categories and the attributes under them, products and their photographs, and who is allowed to touch either. The permission is checked in the backend on every write, not in the interface that hides the button.

The old shop came across in one import with two passes — a WooCommerce export read as CSV, categories first so the tree exists, then products hung on it — so nothing had to be retyped. Around that sits the ordinary discipline: pageviews captured at the edge on EU infrastructure, a sitemap, robots and an llms.txt so the catalogue is legible to search engines and to whatever is now reading on their behalf, and a light and dark theme settled before the first paint.

It is live at goldengate.me.