Home lending, designed like nobody else dares to

A market that runs on one name at a time

Mortgage advice in Australia moves on personal reputation, one recognisable adviser at a time. Chris Bates already had his, as one of the country’s most well known brokers, backed by a growing team under the Alcove name.

The website had to do two things at once. It had to borrow Chris’s standing without becoming a personal site, so the team and the firm could carry weight on their own. And it had to break with the look of the category, where lending sites default to the standard blue corporate register and read like a bank rather than an adviser. Alcove’s identity gave us a starting point. The job was to turn it into a site that didn’t look like anyone else’s.

Nothing the category expects

We started with the story. Most brokers find you a good rate; Alcove’s argument is that rates and fees are the smallest ring of a much bigger picture that runs out through bank selection, loan structure, lending strategy, property strategy, and the life plan behind it all. We built the site’s narrative around that idea, which we called bigger picture brokering, so a visitor meets the whole team’s thinking rather than one adviser’s name.

The design took Alcove’s identity and pushed it where the category never goes. Generous space, editorial typography, and a palette that owes nothing to the banks, carried through with motion and interaction at a level of craft the market rarely sees. The site is built to be explored rather than scanned, which turns out to be how people use it.

Underneath, it’s a Webflow build Alcove’s own team can update and extend as the business and market shift, without a development project each time. The site was built to be worked on, and we’ve stayed on to do that.