Iron House: a gym website that starts with molten iron

Iron House is an SR7 studio project, and nobody commissioned it. It is a strength and conditioning gym that does not exist, built to show what a gym’s website can be when it is treated as a brand and not a template: a name with a story, an identity drawn properly, a film that sets the mood in the first screen, and tools that help someone decide to come in.

The brief I set myself had one hard rule. A gym website lives on trust, so nothing on it could be made up: no invented prices, reviews, opening hours, address or facility claims. Where a real gym would publish those, the page says they are confirmed before opening.

Iron House already had a website: an early WordPress build on an SR7 subdomain, put together from a generic gym template. Red capitals, a stock deadlift photograph, three five-star reviews nobody wrote and a street address that belonged to somebody else. On a phone the page was 573 pixels wide, so the menu button sat off the edge of the screen and could not be reached. An audit on 8 November 2026 recommended starting again, keeping only the name and the idea of a strength gym.

I designed three identities first: a light, drawing-sheet direction, a dark foundry direction called Cast, and a graphite and acid-green one called Truss. Cast won, with Truss’s green carried across, and the mark became a round seal like a maker’s plate cast into iron.

The seal and wordmark were drawn in Adobe Illustrator: slab capitals with a fine casting line through them, the IH monogram at the centre, and the five chapter words of the film set in the same letters. The palette is five colours: Forge Green on Iron, Charcoal and Graphite, with Bone for the type. Green is used only where something can be pressed or picked.

The homepage opens on a film you play with your thumb. Scroll down and it runs in five chapters, from molten iron poured into a sand mould, to a plate cooling in its cast, to racks in low sun, chalk bursting from a lifter’s hands, and a deadlift locked out while a coach watches. Then the film fades and the seal turns into place.

Each shot was made with AI video in Adobe Firefly (Kling 3.0 for the first three, Veo 3.1 for the last two) from a start frame made for that moment, then cut together with soft dissolves and graded to one warm, low-saturation look so the five read as one film. The phone gets its own upright cut, framed on the subject of each shot. A smoothed playhead follows the scroll, so it glides instead of stepping, and it plays forwards and backwards.

The film only starts downloading after the page has loaded, so it never slows the first screen. Anyone who has asked their phone to reduce motion, or is on a very slow connection, gets five still frames telling the same story instead.

Below the film, six ways to train slide past sideways as you scroll: barbell strength, Olympic lifting, conditioning, boxing strength, open floor and 1:1 coaching. On a phone they swipe.

Then the part that does the work. Find your week asks how many days you can train, when (early, lunch, evening, weekend), what you want (stronger, the Olympic lifts, fitness, boxing or your own programme) and how long you have been lifting. It builds a week from the timetable, shows which membership fits and says why in one line, and one button carries that week into the enquiry form, so nobody has to type it twice.

The three memberships, Floor, Programme and Coached, are compared side by side, and the one your week suggests is lifted out. Because Iron House is not open, there are no prices to show, so the page says so plainly and offers to send them first. Contract length and open-floor hours read “confirmed before opening”. It is what a new gym would honestly say in the months before its doors open.

The sample timetable works day by day, and every class has a Try this class button that fills in the enquiry form with that class and time.

Every button on the page ends at one short form: name, email, what you are interested in and anything the coach should know. It really sends. Iron House is not a trading gym, so the form says plainly that enquiries go to SR7 Web Design, the studio that built it, and they arrive in SR7’s inbox.

It is protected the same way as SR7’s own contact form: a hidden field that only bots fill in, a check on how long the form was open, a limit on how many times one connection can send, and every enquiry saved on the server before it is emailed, so a mail problem can never lose one.

Most people looking for a gym are on a phone, so the phone came first. The menu opens full screen. An Enquire bar slides up when you scroll back up the page and hides itself over the form and the tools, so it is there when you want it and never in the way. Nothing runs off the side of the screen.

Before launch, a script pressed every button on a desktop and a phone: each menu link, the film skip, every finder choice, every membership and timetable button, the day tabs and the form. On launch day the same script ran against the live site and sent two real test enquiries, and the server confirmed both were sent.

Iron House went live at ironhousegym.fit on 9 November 2026: a gym brand with a seal drawn in Illustrator, a five-chapter film you scroll through, a tool that builds your training week, and a form that reaches a real inbox, with nothing on the page invented. Lighthouse on the live homepage, phone test, 9 November 2026: performance 96, accessibility 100, best practices 100 and SEO 100, with the main content on screen in 2.1 seconds.

There are no member numbers or reviews here, because it is an independent studio project. What it shows is what a gym, a boxing club or a personal trainer gets when the brand, the film and the build are made together. For another site built around a scroll film, see The Hair Butcher.