For Sale — One Lounge Only
Six pages, finished and live at the link below. I'll put your name, your photographs, and your menu into it, point it at your domain, and hand you the keys.
$2,800Sold once · Live in about a week · Hosting free for the first year
Go Look First
Everything below is real and working right now, on your phone, at this moment. What you'd be buying is this exact site with your lounge's name, photographs and prices in place of the invented ones.
The Site For Sale
HOLLIS & VANE
Six pages — the room, the humidor and bar, membership, private events, and visiting. Open it and click everything.
View the SiteHollis & Vane is invented — a placeholder name, address and price list, so no real lounge was used as a demo. All of it gets replaced with yours.
Why It's For Sale
Here's the whole story, because you'd work it out anyway.
I spent a few weeks building a directory of cigar lounges — seventy-two of them, written up one at a time. Somewhere in the middle of that I got curious about what a really good lounge website would look like, since very few of the ones I was linking to were doing their rooms any favors. So I built one.
Then I finished it and hit the obvious problem: I don't smoke cigars. No lounge, no humidor, no reason on earth to own a beautiful cigar lounge website. I'd made something I'm genuinely proud of for a world I'm only a visitor in.
So rather than leave it in a folder, I'd like it to belong to someone who actually knows this business — who'll put their own room in it, their own name at the top, and get the use out of it that I never will.
That's why it's $2,800 and not $5,000. I'm not trying to recover my time; that's already spent and I enjoyed spending it. The price covers handing it over properly and finding it a home.
In Case You're Wondering
Reasonable thing to want to check before you send anyone $2,800. Two others I've designed and built, both live:
Design is the part of this I'm actually good at, and it's the part you're buying. Go and look at both, then decide whether the sample above is worth what I'm asking.
What You're Buying
Not a theme you install and then fight with. Six hand-built pages, chosen because they're the six things someone wants to know before walking into a lounge for the first time — or booking it for forty guests.
Included in the $2,800
Not included
Be clear on what this is: you're buying a finished thing at a finished-thing price. The layout, the structure, the palette and the typography are already decided. You get your name, your words, your photographs and your prices — you don't get to move the sections around or change the design direction.
That trade is the entire reason it's $2,800 instead of the four or five thousand a custom build runs.
What I Need From You
Worth setting out up front, since gathering this usually takes longer than the build itself.
I send you one document with numbered blanks — your story, your rooms, your menu, your tiers, your hours. You fill it in and send it back with your photographs. I type all of it into the site; you don't touch any code. But the words have to come from you, because I've never sat in your room and you have.
Bring me
If you'd rather not write it
The Honest Breakdown
Nobody shows you this, which is exactly why I do. One price, fixed before anything starts.
Half to start, half at launch. The hosting really is free — it's plain HTML with no database and no monthly software, so it sits on a free tier indefinitely. After the first year it stays there and still costs nothing.
Whoever buys this owns it outright and exclusively. I'm not licensing it, not reselling it, and not building a second one like it for the lounge down the road. When it's gone, this page comes down.
How It Works
You look, then we talk for fifteen minutesClick through every page of the sample first. If you like it, tell me about your room and we'll talk through the photographs you have — that's the part that decides how the finished site feels.
You fill in one documentI send it, you complete it and return it with your photographs. Half the money up front, and the build starts once your document lands — take whatever time you need getting it together.
I rebuild it as yours — three or four daysYou see it at a private link before anyone else does, and we go one round on wording, photographs and prices.
Launch, then I get out of your wayI point your domain at it, test every form on a real phone, and hand over the files with a written guide. Balance due. Fourteen days of fixes, then it's entirely yours.
Questions
That you don't get a say in the design, and that I built it before I ever spoke to you. Those are the only two. The site is genuinely finished and genuinely good, and I'd rather it earned its keep in someone's lounge than sat in a folder proving a point to nobody.
Colors, yes — the whole palette runs off ten values, so I can shift it warmer, cooler, darker, or match your existing branding in an afternoon. Typefaces, yes, within reason. What I won't do is restructure the pages or change the design direction, because at that point you're paying me to build a custom site and this isn't that.
More than anything else you'll send me, honestly. The design leans on photography — dark room, warm light, real detail — so given good pictures it looks expensive, and given dim ones it can't do much on its own. That's worth a conversation early rather than at the end. If it turns out an evening with a local photographer would help, that few hundred dollars will do more for the finished site than anything else on this page.
Not the way you'd edit a Squarespace page. It's hand-written HTML, which is why it loads instantly, and the trade-off is that changing it means editing a file. If your prices move often, say so early and we'll talk about putting the menu somewhere you can update yourself. Otherwise most owners hand it to whoever does their tech, or send me a note once or twice a year.
In a manner of speaking, yes — and that's the deal, stated honestly. This is one site, sold once, handed over cleanly. I'm not becoming your ongoing web person and I'm not running an agency. But you own the files outright, so nothing breaks if I'm not around in two years. That independence is worth more to you than a retainer would be.
Nothing — I'm not taking it any further. It was a research project that taught me a great deal about lounges and produced this site as a by-product, and that's where it ends. There's no directory to be listed in, nothing to buy your way into, and no ongoing thing you'd be signing up to. Just the website, sold once.
Fair question. The answer is that I wrote up seventy-two lounges before I built this, which means I spent a long time working out what separates a room people talk about from a shop with chairs in it. I can't discuss a Nicaraguan binder with you. I can explain your room to a stranger in a way that makes them want to sit in it — and that's the job the website has to do.
Claim It
No deposit at this stage and no obligation. If more than one lounge wants it, first to pay takes it — and I'll tell everyone else straight away rather than leave them hanging.