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Example site for an entirely fictional business — not a real company.

Projects

Houses that were already there.

A selection since 2016, published with the clients' consent. Each entry names the task rather than the budget — without the condition of the existing fabric, a figure says very little.

Photo gallery

  • House T — 1954 subdivision house, story added, insulated, built while occupied

  • Bardwell barn — three apartments, the timber structure left visible

  • Waterside house — infill new build, six apartments, client a housing cooperative

  • Plan and section, House T — survey drawing at 1:50

  • Two yards, Cape Elizabeth — nineteenth-century house, reordered inside

  • Attic in Rosemont — two box rooms and a corridor become one apartment

  • Junction of new build and old fabric — construction detail at 1:20

  • Stable block, Gorham — former workshop turned into a house

  • Extension in East Bayside — kitchen and dining space on a 1968 row house

Outlines instead of photographs: this demo shows a made-up business, so there are no real pictures of it. Your own website would show your own shots here.

Who we build with

Hartley + Partners, structural engineers
Building physics consultancy, Brunswick
Plan B building services, Biddeford
Garrod carpentry, Freeport
Waterside housing cooperative
Garner electrical, Portland

Want to see a project in detail?

For every job there are drawings, photographs and an honest cost breakdown. We show them at the office where the clients have agreed.

Wheeler Kesteven Architects

Architecture for housing and for building on what is already there. All nine work stages, practice based in Portland, Maine.

© 2026 Wheeler Kesteven Architects · wheelerkesteven.com

Demo site — practice and projects are fictional

The project frame

How Awelior would approach this project

Wheeler Kesteven Architects is invented — the way it is built is not. None of this is work delivered for a client. It is the shape we would give such a project — with the same depth, but without a client who would have to answer for it.

Where it starts

Wheeler Kesteven Architects work on housing and on existing buildings, across all nine work stages. Anyone commissioning them either has a plot or a house that should stay — and in both cases rarely knows what an architect actually does. So the site has to do two things at once: show work and explain scope.

Decisions

  • Projects on their own page, not as an endless gallery

    The home page carries a selection; the full gallery sits one level down. That leaves room for the text about how the practice works — the first thing to disappear on a pure image page.

  • Work stages written out

    “Work stages 1 to 9” tells a client nothing. So the services page sets them out as a sequence of steps, with expandable questions covering exactly the points that always come up in a first meeting.

  • A quiet archetype, but muted color

    The same restrained archetype as the law firm, with a different palette and a motif built from plan, elevation and section. Two businesses share the attitude and part company in the imagery.

Deliberately left outNo named client quotes and no price range. A fee depends on construction cost and scope; a number on the website would either be wrong or so hedged that it says nothing.

What is in it

Pages
5
Content blocks
22
Languages
4

Five pages, in all four languages. Navigation, the gallery with its enlarged view and the expandable questions all respond. Indicated only: every project image — schematic drawings stand in for photographs, because an invented practice has no real buildings.

How it would go on

  • Project pages instead of captions

    Each project with its own page: brief, existing fabric, intervention, figures, photographer and clearance. That is the real scope of work for an architecture practice.

  • Image rights

    Architectural photography is licensed. Using it means usage rights, credits, and an archive that still proves both a few years later.

  • Applications

    The news list attracts graduates. Behind it belongs a route by which portfolios actually arrive, without a mailbox failing on a file size.

Talk through your project