Casa Madre.

A boutique agency that needed independence, not just a website

-- THE CLIENT

Casa Madre helps clients buy, sell, and rent distinctive homes in Barcelona's most characterful neighbourhoods. As a two-person boutique, their brand depends on a personal, editorial feel — the opposite of the portal-listing aesthetic that dominates real estate.

The brief had a clear underlying requirement: the founders needed to run their digital presence themselves — publishing properties, writing journal articles, updating their own team cards — without a developer on call for every change. In both Spanish and English, for an international clientele.

The answer was a structured content platform with AI assistance built into the editorial workflow itself: the agents enter the facts, and the system helps write the words.

Quiet luxury — an editorial design language for real estate

-- DESIGN SYSTEM

The design language was built around restraint: a warm palette of cream, clay, and deep brown, serif display typography, generous white space, and subtle motion that respects reduced-motion preferences. A cinematic video hero and Ken Burns imagery give the property presentation an editorial, magazine-like quality — deliberately unlike the crowded aesthetic of property portals. Every component follows the same tokens, spacing, and motion vocabulary, so the site feels like one considered object rather than assembled sections.

Next.js and Sanity — structured content the client owns

-- STACK & ARCHITECTURE

The platform is built on Next.js with TypeScript and Sanity CMS as the structured content backbone. Properties, neighbourhoods, journal articles, and the agent team all live as typed Sanity documents, edited in a Studio customised in Spanish for the client, with English slugs for international SEO.

Bilingual content runs through internationalized fields with locale-aware queries, next-intl handles the frontend routing, and the contact funnel delivers enquiries to both agents simultaneously via a validated, rate-limited, honeypot-protected API route with SMTP delivery. Privacy decisions were architectural: a static, consent-free map card instead of an embedded tracker, and analytics gated behind cookie consent.

One Studio, two languages, zero developer dependency

-- BILINGUAL CONTENT

Every content type on the platform — property listings with galleries and filters, neighbourhood guides, journal articles, the founders' own contact cards with photos — is fully editable by the client in Sanity Studio, in both languages. The Studio is configured in Spanish with helper text guiding correct data entry, and the client began managing their own content (including uploading their team photos) before the project was even handed over — the clearest possible validation of a self-service architecture.

AI that drafts elegant listings — and never invents a square metre

-- AI WRITING ASSISTANT

The platform's differentiator is an AI writing assistant built directly into the client's editorial workflow. For journal articles, it drafts editorial content from a topic. For property listings, it goes further: the agent fills in the structured facts — operation, type, neighbourhood, price, size, rooms — adds optional notes, and the assistant generates an evocative title, a two-to-three paragraph description written natively in both Spanish and English, and suggested highlight tags.

The prompt engineering is where the real product thinking lives: the assistant writes in the brand's editorial voice with a hard ban on portal clichés — and a stricter rule for real estate: it may only use facts the agent provided. No invented terraces, no imagined renovations. The agent reviews everything in a preview and inserts per field; a human approves every word before it publishes. The API key stays server-side, on the client's own AI account.

Editorial imagery without the editorial load times

-- PERFORMANCE

An image-heavy real-estate site lives or dies on performance. Sanity's image pipeline delivers hotspot-cropped, responsive assets; Next.js server rendering keeps every page indexable; and the deliberate absence of third-party embeds — no map SDK, no pre-consent scripts — keeps the loading waterfall clean. The result is a visually rich site that still scores where it matters for both SEO and the impatient property browser.

A live platform the client runs herself — with AI as a daily tool

-- THE OUTCOME

Casa Madre launched on its own domain with the full platform live: bilingual property listings, journal, personal agent cards, a working enquiry funnel to both founders, and an AI assistant the agents use as part of their normal publishing workflow — not as a gimmick, but as the tool that turns their property facts into publication-ready copy in two languages.

This project reflects the kind of work I focus on as an AI Product Engineer: not adding AI for its own sake, but embedding it precisely where it saves a real client real hours — inside the workflow they already use, with guardrails that protect their brand and their compliance.