The Ludorum Club

The brief

The Ludorum Club is a private personal training gym on Margaret Street, a few minutes north of Oxford Circus, founded by coach Jake Hitchcock. Training there is one to one, and only one to one. There is no open gym, no membership and no crowd.

Clubs like this grow by word of mouth. Someone hears the name, looks it up, and decides from the website whether it is for them. So the site had one job: show what it is like to walk in, introduce the person who will be coaching you, and make it easy to start a conversation. Jake's brief was to show the club as a lovely space and keep everything else simple.

The approach

The design starts from the building. The palette is sampled from the club's own rooms: the sage of the painted gym wall, a paper cream, bottle green, and the cognac of the leather benches. Headings are set in EB Garamond and text in Schibsted Grotesk, while Graduate, a varsity slab that echoes the painted wordmark, is kept for numerals. Corners are square, there are no icons, and every photograph is of the club itself.

The homepage opens on the painted wall, because the wall is the logo. Scroll, and the view turns the corner into the gym: the second photograph wipes across the first, and the line changes to "The floor is yours for the hour." Elsewhere only the photographs move, uncovering as they come into view.

From there the page walks through the club room by room: the gymnasium, the locker rooms, the green marble showers and the lounge, each with a short caption in the club's own voice.

The film

The club has a short film: Jake talking to camera in the lounge, cut with footage of the rooms. It sits on the homepage under his name, because the film opens with him introducing himself, and that is where a visitor decides whether to book.

The player was built for this page rather than borrowed from a video platform. Its controls are words set in the site's own type, with a ruled timeline, captions drawn by the page, and colours that follow the band it sits in. The film is hosted with the site and encoded twice, in AV1 for browsers that support it and H.264 for the rest, and nothing downloads until someone presses play.

What shipped

A hand-built site covering the club, the method, how training works, careers and enquiries. The club's quarterly newsletter moved across from Squarespace as Club News, with redirects from the old addresses so existing links still land. The enquiry and careers forms deliver straight to the club through its own email service, so no enquiry passes through Meko, and the privacy notices were drafted as part of the build.

Jake reviewed every page on a live preview and raised changes as pins in the Meko portal, each one placed on the exact part of the page it was about.