Ember & Ash, wood-fire restaurant
Ember & Ash is a concept website we designed and built for a fictional wood-fire restaurant. It uses no photography at all: 3,600 embers animated on the GPU rise off a glowing coal bed and drift with your cursor, alongside a tabbed menu, a scroll-pinned timeline and a working table-booking flow. It runs at 60fps on integrated graphics.
The brief
Independent restaurants mostly run on interchangeable templates: a stock photo, a PDF menu and a booking widget. The brief was to make the fire itself the brand, with no photography at all.
What we built
A GPU ember field that rises off a glowing coal bed and drifts with your cursor, a tabbed menu, a scroll-pinned 'day at the hearth' timeline and a table-booking flow, with every visual drawn in code.
Build facts
Verifiable facts about this build, not client results.
- 3,600
- Embers animated on the GPU
- 60 fps
- On a laptop's integrated GPU
- 0
- Image files used
Stack
- Next.js
- React Three Fiber
- GLSL shaders
- GSAP ScrollTrigger
- Tailwind CSS
How it was made.
Why no photography
Stock food photography is the single most interchangeable thing about restaurant websites, and commissioning a shoot is out of reach for most independents before they open. Building the atmosphere in code instead means the brand can be art-directed with a colour and a physics constant rather than a photographer's calendar.
3,600 embers, one draw call
The ember field is a single instanced buffer geometry driven by a GLSL vertex shader. Position, drift and flicker are computed per-particle on the GPU from a time uniform and a seeded offset, so the CPU does nothing each frame. That is what keeps it at 60fps on an integrated GPU rather than a workstation card.
Motion that knows when to stop
The whole ember system is gated behind prefers-reduced-motion and pauses when the canvas leaves the viewport. The menu, the timeline and the booking flow are plain server-rendered HTML underneath, so the site works completely with the canvas disabled.
This build is an example of our Website Development work. If you want something like it for your own business, tell us what you need.
More concept builds
- Torque & Co., independent garageA garage website built around trust: an exploded brake assembly you scroll apart, up-front pricing and a plain-English symptom checker.
- Morrow Coffee, specialty caféA café website with a 3D cup, a drink builder that re-pours your order as you choose it, and a tap-to-stamp loyalty card.
- Cleaning company website with online bookingA cleaning company website where a 3D kit unpacks into its tools as you scroll, and a booking form prices the visit before anyone picks up the phone.
- Home health therapy staffing website redesignA redesign concept for a company that matches home health agencies with physical, occupational and speech therapists: two audiences, two paths and a 3D diagram of how a referral moves.
Want one of these for a real brand?
Tell us what you need and get a written scope, timeline and fixed quote within 48 hours of a free 30-minute call, whether or not you hire us.
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