NVS: North v South, a travel website you can sail, walk and climb through

NVS: North v South is an SR7 studio project, and nobody commissioned it. It is a private travel house that does not exist, built to answer one question: what does a travel website look like when it sells the place before it sells the itinerary?

Most travel sites are a search box and a grid of cards. This one has nine destinations, from the Antarctic Peninsula to Petra, and each one has its own experience that you scroll through and steer yourself. Then a planner picks up what you chose along the way and writes it into a personal journey brief, ending at an enquiry form that really sends.

The homepage opens on one line, The world, by private arrangement, over the dead trees of Deadvlei. Below it the nine destinations each get a full screen: the Antarctic Peninsula, Sossusvlei, Greenland, Svalbard, Patagonia, the Okavango Delta, the Galápagos, Bhutan and Petra. Each panel has two doors, one to the journey and one straight into the experience.

The look is one deep sea-blue, a fine serif with an italic voice, and a single orange button that always means the same thing: plan your journey. The photographs do the rest.

Every destination has a journey page that reads like a letter, not a brochure. Antarctica opens with You wake, and the horizon has turned white, then walks through the days, the voyage and life aboard a small yacht, and ends on one question: which southern summer?

There are no star ratings and no countdown timers. The page gives you the feeling of the trip and one clear next step.

Antarctica came first and set the standard for the rest. Its experience is a voyage you sail by scrolling: the Drake Passage, the Gerlache Strait, Paradise Harbour, the Lemaire Channel and on towards the Circle. You can set the sea state on the crossing and watch the swell answer. In Paradise Harbour you drag the waterline down and find that half of the iceberg was under the water all along.

The controls are drawn like a ship’s instruments, there is a clear view button that hides everything but the picture, and a chart of the route sits at the end for anyone who wants it. George, who runs SR7, is a Master Mariner, so the track, the sea states and the vessel had to stand up to a seaman’s eye.

The rule for the other eight was that none could be a copy of the first. Each place got the one thing that makes it itself.

In Petra you walk the Siq: the walls close over you as you scroll, the Treasury appears round the last bend, and you can walk it again by candlelight. In Greenland you sail into Scoresby Sund and cut the engine to hear the ice. In Svalbard you turn the whole year, from noon in the polar night to a sun that has stopped setting by late April. Sossusvlei is one day in the Namib, from first light to dark. Patagonia makes you wait for the weather. In the Okavango you sit still and low in a mokoro. The Galápagos lets you come closer. Bhutan is the climb.

Each experience has its own sound: wind, sea and whales in the south, footsteps and a candle in the Siq, a river, prayer flags and a bell in Bhutan. None of it plays until you press the sound button, and the page remembers your choice. A website that starts making noise on its own gets closed, so this one waits to be asked.

This is the part that does the work. Inside each experience a quiet line says that some of what you find along the way can be kept for your plan. Keep a month in Svalbard or first light on the dunes, and when you open the planner it already knows. It never asks you the same thing twice, and you can change or remove anything you kept.

The planner itself is nine short questions, about two minutes, one at a time, with your letter building beside you as you answer. Nothing leaves the page unless you choose to send it. Only what you deliberately keep is carried over; nothing is recorded by watching where you scroll.

The last step sends your brief: the place, the season, what you kept and your own words, as one plain email with a reference number. NVS is not a trading travel company, so the site says plainly that it is a studio project by SR7 Web Design, and the brief arrives in SR7’s inbox.

The page only says “sent” when the mail server has accepted the message. It is protected the way SR7’s own contact form is: a hidden field that only bots fill in, a check on how quickly the form was sent, and a limit on how many times one connection can send. The server keeps no copy of the enquiry.

There is no framework underneath. NVS is static HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript, written by hand, with the fonts served from the site itself. That matters on a site this full of photographs and film: on an emulated slow phone the homepage’s largest picture painted in 1.1 to 1.2 seconds when measured.

Every experience was built for a phone as well as a desk, with controls big enough for a thumb. The photography, film and sound are licensed, and where a licence asks for a credit it is given on a credits page, not scattered over the pictures.

NVS: North v South went live at nvsluxurytravel.co.uk on 14 November 2026: nine destinations, nine experiences that are nothing like each other, a planner that remembers what you chose, and a form that reaches a real inbox.

There are no booking numbers or reviews here, because it is an independent studio project. What it shows is what a travel company, a hotel, a lodge or a tour operator gets when the story, the photography and the build are made together. For another site built around a scroll film, see Iron House.