Duchy of Cornwall Holiday Cottages

Overview

The Duchy of Cornwall is one of the UK's most storied private estates, with landholdings across 20 counties and a collection of exclusive self-catering properties spanning rural Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. 

We were already working with the Duchy of Cornwall team, supporting their Duchy of Cornwall Nursery website, when they approached us about updating the Duchy of Cornwall Holiday Cottages website. 

The site was running on an older, unsupported version of ExpressionEngine, and the business needed a modern, maintainable foundation it could grow from.

We rebuilt the site from the ground up in Craft CMS, in partnership with Channel who led the UX and UI design.

The challenge

The existing site had been built on an older version of ExpressionEngine that had served the Duchy well, but had reached the end of its practical life. With that version no longer in active development, the team's options for updating and evolving the site were increasingly limited, and it made sense to move to a modern platform before those constraints started to affect the business.

At the same time, the site had a significant job to do. It needed to present 30+ individual properties across multiple Cornish estates and the Isles of Scilly, handle real-time availability search and booking via a third-party system, and support a rich editorial offering - journals, destination guides, local experiences - that sets the Duchy apart from a standard holiday lettings site.

The brief was to rebuild the site in a modern CMS, migrate the existing content, and preserve the SuperControl booking integration - without disrupting the experience guests already knew.

What we built

We rebuilt the site on the latest version of Craft CMS, with the front-end redeveloped using Tailwind CSS. 

Craft CMS's flexible content architecture was a natural fit for the complexity of the Duchy's offering, allowing us to model the site around the way the business actually thinks about its properties - by location, by collection type, and by the wider lifestyle content that runs through the brand.

Existing content was migrated from the ExpressionEngine site into Craft CMS, giving the team a clean, modern editorial environment without losing what they'd built up. The new CMS puts the Duchy team in control: property listings, photography, editorial content and collections can all be updated without developer involvement.

The SuperControl integration was rebuilt as part of the project, embedding availability search and the booking widget directly into property pages rather than redirecting guests to an external interface. A site-wide search - filtering by date, duration, party size, location and pets - anchors the browsing experience throughout the site, with deep-linking parameters ensuring smooth handoffs from listing to booking.

Ongoing support, maintenance and updates

We continue to support the Duchy team on an ongoing basis, managing CMS and plugin updates, new property additions, seasonal content changes, security patches and technical maintenance as the site and portfolio evolve.

The result

The rebuilt site gives the Duchy of Cornwall Holiday Cottages a platform that matches the quality of the properties it showcases. Content that once required technical intervention can now be managed directly by the Duchy team - new properties added, collections updated, seasonal campaigns published - without any development overhead.

The move to Craft CMS has also given the business room to grow. Since launch, the portfolio has expanded with new estates and collections, all absorbed into the site without structural changes. It's the kind of flexibility that only becomes obvious over time, and it's why we continue to work closely with the Duchy team as the site evolves.