Most architecture practices don't serve one client type. They serve two, and those two clients are looking for almost opposite things.
The residential client wants to feel understood as an individual, their family, their site, their story. The commercial client wants proof of process, delivery, and scale.
Put both on the same website badly, and the residential client thinks the practice is too corporate to care about them. The commercial client thinks the practice is a lifestyle studio that can't handle a real programme.
Most practices solve this by choosing a side, or by building two disconnected identities that don't feel like the same firm at all. Neither is necessary.
No Clear Route to the Right Work
The instinct, when a practice notices its residential and commercial work sit awkwardly together, is to avoid the decision entirely.
Everything goes into one undifferentiated portfolio grid, sorted by date or by whichever image looks best, with no clear route through to the work that actually matters to the person looking. A residential client lands on the site and has to wade past office fit-outs and masterplans to find a house. A commercial client has to scroll through kitchen extensions before they find anything that proves the practice can handle their budget and programme.
That's a navigation failure, and it costs the practice both audiences at once.
A Portfolio Isn't a Pitch
The second, deeper problem is what visitors find once they do land in the right place.
Most architecture websites offer nothing but images. A grid of finished projects with no explanation of process, no account of how the practice actually works, and no stated point of view on what makes their approach different from the firm down the road.
Photography proves a practice can produce a good-looking building. It proves nothing about whether they're the right choice for a specific client's specific problem. A portfolio with no context asks the visitor to make that judgement entirely on their own.
A residential client wants proof they'll be understood as an individual. A commercial client wants proof of process, delivery, and scale. If the site can't get each of them to that proof in two clicks, it's already lost them, no matter how good the underlying work is.
What the Practices Getting It Right Actually Do
ID Architecture. The Lincolnshire practice splits its own navigation cleanly into RESIDENTIAL and COMMERCIAL, so there's no pretending the two audiences aren't different.
Scroll either section and the same position is doing the work underneath: design-led architecture that wins planning permission on genuinely difficult sites, blending new form into sensitive landscapes and listed buildings alike. A rural AONB home and a Grade II-listed office restoration read as the same firm, because the sector split organises the content without diluting the belief sitting underneath it.
K2LD. Operating across Singapore, Melbourne, and Kuala Lumpur, K2LD's site divides its expertise into seven categories, architecture, interior design, single and multi-residential, commercial, hospitality, education, public. That's about as fragmented as a navigation bar gets.
What holds it together is a single sentence stated on the homepage itself: an aspiration to deliver "timeless spaces with inherent integrity and connection." Every sector page, from a private house to a hotel to a workplace fit-out, is answerable to that one line. The categories organise the browsing. The sentence organises the brand.
The Structural Principle
Sector navigation is not the problem. All two practices above use it, some of them extensively.
The problem is when sector navigation is the only organising idea on the site. That leaves visitors with nothing to hold onto except "this firm does houses" or "this firm does offices," and neither on its own is a reason to hire anyone.
The fix isn't structural, it's strategic, and it has to happen before a single page is designed.
Name the belief that a residential client and a commercial client would both recognise as true about how the practice works. Everything else, the navigation, the imagery, the tone shifts between sections, becomes an expression of that belief rather than a substitute for it.
Questions to Consider
• If you removed the words "residential" and "commercial" from your site entirely, would a visitor still understand what makes your practice distinctive?
• Does your commercial work currently make your residential clients nervous, or your residential work make commercial clients doubt your capacity? If so, what's missing isn't a redesign. It's the sentence that should sit above both.
• Could the same paragraph, with only the photography changed, credibly introduce both your largest commercial project and your most personal residential one?
Download our Cultural Practice Brand Roadmap to see how to build a website that carries one belief across every sector you work in. If this raised questions about how clearly your website is currently serving both audiences, you can enquire with us here.
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