Northline is built work, drawings, and a practice enquiry. Hauswerk is finishes, spec sheets, and trade. Both are spatial. They are not the same website wearing different grey. This is a working note from the VicanTheme journal, written for architects, interior studios, and material houses choosing a spatial site. The catalog we keep returning to is HTML templates, because files you can host beat a locked builder when the brand has to last.
If you already know the industry, skip ahead to the recommended demo — Northline — and use the headings as a checklist rather than a speech.
What each pack thinks the product is
Northline thinks the product is a building: work, practice, approach, contact. Drawings and job-site light are the proof. Hauswerk thinks the product is a material in a room: samples, projects, trade accounts, specification. If you hide the swatch, Hauswerk has nothing to say. If you hide the plan, Northline becomes a moodboard. Grove sits nearby for landscape practices that need canopy, soil, and seasons rather than interiors or massing.
Spatial brands blur on purpose. An architecture studio with an interior line needs to pick a homepage. If the RFQ is for a building, Northline. If the email is a specifier asking for a finish, Hauswerk. Do not mash a work index and a sample library into one nav because the partners share an office.
Drawings versus samples in the browser
Northline should let a section drawing breathe. Fullscreen sliders that crop the lineweight are the failure mode. Hauswerk should let a swatch sit beside an installed room, with a spec sheet that is a document, not a furniture marketplace with forty filters. Click through both demos on a tablet, where spatial people actually compare. If Hauswerk looks like a shop and Northline looks like a screensaver, keep walking.
Type is a tell. Practice sites can carry a quiet grotesque and a caption that names the client. Material sites need product names that remain readable at spec-sheet density. If you sell both services, you pick one visual parent per URL. Preview Northline’s approach page against Hauswerk’s trade page. The conversion copy is different: project enquiry versus account or specification.
Who should not force a fit
A furniture retailer with SKUs is not Hauswerk. A visualisation mill with no built work is a weak Northline until there are buildings. A landscape practice should look at Grove before stretching either pack across a planting plan. Private clubs and dining rooms are other families. The catalog is industry-shaped on purpose. Worldwide English does not mean one grey template for every studio with a nice chair in the photo.
Agencies pitching a spatial identity often want one kit for the whole group. Resist. The materials house and the architecture arm can share tokens and photography direction without sharing templates. Sister brands are a handover problem, not a reason to pick the wrong bones. Northline’s sister in spirit is Hauswerk; that does not make them aliases. Buy the pack that matches the URL’s job this year.
A choice you can defend in a partner meeting
Write the sitemap on paper. If the words are work, practice, approach, you are in Northline. If the words are materials, projects, trade, you are in Hauswerk. If the words are projects, planting, climate, you are in Grove. Then open the live preview and try to place last year’s best photograph. The pack that does not crop that picture wins. Taste arguments after that are decoration.
Implementation is the same discipline either way: replace demo buildings or demo rooms, write the enquiry as staff would, isolate CSS, deploy the folder. Do not add a plugin garden to look more like a platform. Spatial clients distrust noisy websites. Your job is to look like the office, not like a marketplace. VicanTheme’s cut is the quiet. Your photographs are the proof.
Questions people actually ask
Can one studio run both themes on sister domains?
Yes. Use two licenses. Share photography rules if you want, not a cloned ZIP with the logo swapped.
Which is better for SEO?
The one whose pages match the queries you can win: project types versus material names. A mismatched template will not rank its way out of the wrong sitemap.
Keep reading: Architecture practice website design: layout that does the job and Best HTML template for architecture practice sites in 2026. Or browse Comparisons in the journal.
