CLIENT
King & Partners
TECHNOLOGIES
Ruby on Rails, WordPress (Headless), PHP, REST API, JavaScript, HTML, CSS / SASS
YEAR
2022
EXTERNAL URL
Full-stack development on a decoupled web platform for a luxury vacation rental brand — my introduction to King & Partners and the Rails-based headless WordPress stack that I would later apply across three GrandLife Hotels properties. Working across a Ruby on Rails frontend and a headless WordPress backend delivering content via REST API.
Development lead on this project at King & Partners.
Background
A luxury vacation rental brand needed its digital platform to match the product.
Villatel is the first “flag” hospitality brand in the vacation rental sector — a company that designs, builds, maintains, and services every property in its portfolio rather than aggregating third-party listings. Operating luxury resort communities near Orlando’s theme parks, Villatel positioned itself as the branded alternative to Airbnb and VRBO: hotel-grade consistency delivered in spacious private villas with up to twelve bedrooms, private pools, and concierge-level services. The company entered a market that was surging — the global vacation rental sector cleared $82 billion in 2022, driven by post-pandemic demand for privacy, space, and direct booking experiences that bypassed traditional hotel constraints.
King & Partners — a luxury branding agency with clients including Auberge Resorts, Four Seasons, and JP Morgan Chase — handled Villatel’s brand identity and digital strategy. This was my first engagement with the agency, and the decoupled Rails-and-WordPress architecture I learned here became the foundation for every subsequent King & Partners build, including the Soho Grand Hotel, Soho Diner, and The Django.
Implementation
Decoupled architecture: Rails on the frontend, WordPress as the content engine.
The platform operated on a headless architecture — WordPress served as the content management layer, exposing structured data through the REST API, while a Ruby on Rails application handled routing, page rendering, and frontend presentation. I worked across both sides of that boundary. On the WordPress end, I built and extended custom post types, API endpoints, and content structures that powered property listings, resort community pages, and brand narrative sections. On the Rails side, I developed views, partials, and controller logic that consumed those API responses and rendered the guest-facing experience. The decoupled pattern meant content editors worked entirely within WordPress while the frontend operated independently — deployable, cacheable, and architecturally separate.
This was my first time working in a Ruby on Rails codebase. The transition was immediate. Rails’ MVC conventions, ERB templating, and routing patterns mapped directly to concepts I had internalized through years of PHP and WordPress development. The language was different; the architectural thinking was the same. I operated within the existing Rails patterns from the start — no ramp-up period, no scaffolding phase — shipping production features on the project’s timeline.
Results
Production features shipped, platform extended, architectural fluency demonstrated.
The work I delivered expanded the platform’s content capabilities and frontend presentation at a moment when Villatel was scaling its resort portfolio and refining its direct-to-consumer digital presence. The headless architecture held — WordPress content updates flowed through the API layer to the Rails frontend without deployment dependencies, giving the marketing team editorial independence while preserving the engineering team’s ability to iterate on presentation and performance separately. The structured content models I built on the WordPress side continued to serve the platform beyond my engagement.
Villatel proved that strong engineering fundamentals transfer across platforms and languages. Moving from deep PHP and WordPress specialization into a Ruby on Rails codebase — and shipping production work without a ramp-up period — demonstrated the kind of versatility that comes from understanding architecture, not just syntax. The fluency I developed here paid dividends immediately: King & Partners brought me on for the GrandLife Hotels portfolio next, where I applied the same decoupled patterns across the Soho Grand, Soho Diner, and The Django.
Related Projects
No projects match your current filters.