curtiKalatua
Rebuilding a Caribbean beach club around the systems it already ran on.
Visit the live site
Four Businesses, One Stretch of Sand
Kalatua sits on the sand at Mullet Bay, one of the most photographed beaches in Sint Maarten. It is a Mediterranean restaurant led by Chef Gil Dumoulin, a lounger-and-daybed beach club, the only authorised Seabob and Fliteboard centre on the island, and a private events venue for weddings and celebrations.
Four businesses, four different guests, four different ways to book. The site had to make all of them obvious without turning the page into a directory.
A Site the Business Had Outgrown.
The original site was built on Webflow. It presented Kalatua as a restaurant with a few extras attached, at a point when the beach club, the water sports centre and the events business had each become significant on their own.
The platform was also a recurring cost with no matching return. A seasonal business was paying a monthly subscription to host a site that rarely changed, and anything beyond what the platform natively supported meant workarounds that got fragile.
One Page, Four Journeys.
The direction was a single scrolling page with anchored navigation, so a guest who arrives looking for lunch discovers the eFoils on the way down. Nothing important sits two clicks deep.
The visual language follows the property itself: sand, sea, warm light and a lot of open space, with the photography doing the selling.
Built Around the Systems They Already Use.
The most important decision on this project was what not to rebuild.
Reservations stay on OpenTable. Kalatua already ran table bookings through OpenTable, with the discovery traffic and review history that come with it. Replacing a working system with a custom form would have meant retraining front of house and losing that visibility, for no gain. Every reservation call to action across the site routes into their existing listing, with a separate deep link so beach chair bookings arrive as their own reservation type rather than mixing in with dining covers.
Water sports stay with the partner platform. Equipment hire runs on a specialist system with its own inventory, waivers and instructor scheduling. The site sells the experience, with a card for each activity, then hands off cleanly at the point of intent. The site does the persuading. The specialist system does the transacting.
From a Single Funnel to Four Clear Paths.
Table reservations, beach loungers, water sports and private events each now have their own section, their own imagery and their own booking route, without a single one leaving the page.
Content That Changes as Often as the Catch.
Chef Gil's menu moves with the seasons and the daily catch. A hard-coded menu goes stale within a month, and a stale menu costs more trust than no menu at all.
Restaurant, beach, cocktails, wine and dessert menus each sit in a tabbed viewer with page previews and a PDF download. Updating a menu means dropping in a new file.
The site also ships in English and French. Sint Maarten is a split island, and Kalatua's own culinary story is rooted in Mediterranean and French tradition, so both versions carry the same structure and the same booking paths.
Every Route to a Human, One Tap Away.
Someone standing in a car park in the sun will not fill in a form. They will tap.
Click to call, WhatsApp click to chat, direct email, an embedded map with one-tap directions from wherever the guest is standing, and full valet parking details including the driver's WhatsApp number. Guest reviews sit immediately before the contact section, so the last thing a visitor reads before booking is someone else saying it was worth it. A live Instagram strip closes the page and sends traffic to the account doing the heaviest marketing.
Private events, the highest value and slowest-closing bookings, get their own path entirely: capacity, per-head pricing, catering and bar options, a gallery, and a quote request with a stated 24-hour response.
Private events, reviews and hours, one thumb-scroll away on a phone.
The Result
Kalatua now runs on a custom site built for four businesses instead of one, delivered in four weeks, with every system the team already depended on left exactly where it was.
Off the Platform, Onto Their Own Stack
The monthly Webflow subscription is gone and hosting costs a fraction of what the platform did. Changes go live in under a minute.
Four Revenue Streams, Four Booking Paths
Restaurant, beach club, water sports and private events each sell themselves properly and route to the right system.
Nothing Broken to Fix It
OpenTable and the water sports platform stayed in place. No retraining, no migration risk, no lost booking history.
