Concept – demonstration website

Pl. 12About this concept

About the concept

Concept – demonstration website

A place that does not exist

Nuits de Provence is a fictional project: a stargazing retreat imagined on the Sault plateau, in the Vaucluse. The website is a demonstration of web design, visual design and writing. No stay can be booked and no payment is ever requested. The accommodation, packages, prices, availability and gift vouchers are invented; the booking flow deliberately ends on “nothing was booked”.

What is true

The sky is real. Moon phases, sunrise and sunset times and planet positions are computed in your browser for the coordinates of Sault (44.09° N, 5.41° E), using published methods: Jean Meeus’s algorithms (Astronomical Algorithms) and JPL’s approximate orbital elements. They are approximations, accurate to a few minutes for times and to about a degree for positions.

The articles in the Provence notebook describe real places, festivals, recipes and crafts; their sources are listed at the end of each article. The Sault plateau is known for the quality of its night sky, but no establishment of this name welcomes visitors there.

Privacy

  • No cookies, no analytics, no scripts or fonts loaded from another website.
  • The forms never ask for a name or an address. The booking form only sends dates and accommodation choices, to show a summary; the gift voucher is put together entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored.
  • Your choice of day or night theme is kept in your browser’s local storage, and nowhere else.
  • Like any website, the host (Cloudflare) processes the technical data needed to serve the pages, such as your IP address.

Credits

  • Illustrations: generated with an AI image tool (Google Gemini) from the project’s art direction, an architect’s sketchbook in ink and watercolour, then cut out and recomposed for the site. None of them is a photograph or a real place.
  • Typefaces: Poiret One (The Poiret One Project Authors), Architects Daughter (Kimberly Geswein) and Literata (The Literata Project Authors), under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, served from this site.
  • Texts: written for the project in French, then translated into English, German and Dutch.

How it is made

A static website built with Astro and TypeScript, with no JavaScript framework: only a few small scripts animate the starry sky, the moon calendar and the “Tonight’s sky” widget. Everything can be read and used without JavaScript. Four languages, a WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility target, fonts and images served from the same domain.