An architecture practice has two audiences that never meet. There are clients, who need to see the work and understand whether this studio can be trusted with a building. And there is the team, who need to file leave, log hours, and keep projects moving. Most studios solve the first with a website and the second with a spreadsheet.
FS Architects decided to solve both properly. What we built for them at fsarchitects.ph is the public site, plus their own dedicated app — an operations hub that installs onto a phone like any other app, and now runs the practice from the inside.
The site: let the buildings be the loudest thing
Architecture sites fail in a specific way — they over-design around the work until the interface competes with the buildings. We went the other direction. A quiet, gallery-like presentation, generous space, and project pages that let a render fill the screen without a caption fighting for attention.
The practice works across Mindanao and takes commissions from commercial clients like BYD Butuan through to private residences, so the site runs trilingual navigation — English, Spanish and Chinese — rather than assuming every prospective client reads the same language. That is a structural decision, not a plugin: it shapes how every page is built.
“For an architecture studio, restraint is the credential. If your website is the loudest thing you have designed, that tells a client something.”
The hub: where the practice actually runs
Behind the public site sits their own instance of Sentro, the HR and operations hub we built for creative teams in the Philippines. Not a generic SaaS subscription — their own deployment, shaped to how the practice works.
What it handles day to day:
- Attendance and daily hours, feeding directly into payroll instead of being retyped
- Leave and time-off requests, with the practice’s own policy encoded rather than approximated
- Payroll runs, payslips and the approval trail behind them
- Performance appraisals as a staged workflow, not a form emailed around
- Project and task tracking, so studio operations sit next to the people data
The detail that matters most there is the last-mile one: time off flows into payroll automatically. That single connection removes an entire category of month-end reconciliation, which is the sort of thing nobody notices when it works and everybody notices when it does not.
The app: because nobody clocks in at a desktop
A hub only earns its keep if people actually use it, and staff are rarely at a laptop when they need to file a request or clock in. So the hub is the app — it installs onto the home screen with its own icon, opens straight to login without browser furniture, and keeps working through the patchy connectivity that is a fact of life on site.
The practical test is what the owner can do with it. They open the app on their phone and see attendance for the day, the requests waiting on them, and where payroll stands — without asking anyone to export anything. That is the difference between a system the office uses and a system the person running the practice actually uses.
We built it as a progressive web app rather than shipping to the app stores. For an internal tool used by one practice, store review cycles and separate iOS and Android codebases are cost with no return. Staff install it from a link, and updates reach everyone the moment we deploy.
Why one team for all three
These are usually three separate vendors: an agency for the site, a SaaS subscription for HR, and a developer for anything custom. The seams between them are where the cost hides — data retyped between systems, branding drifting apart, and nobody owning the parts in between.
Running it as one engagement meant the public site, the hub and the app share a visual language and a codebase lineage. You can see the site itself in our web design portfolio, alongside work like Hulma Cebu and SmartGrid Western.
If you are running a practice on spreadsheets and a template site, the gap between those two things is probably costing more than you think. Come tell us how you work.
Trilingual is a structure, not a translation layer
Running English, Spanish and Chinese is straightforward if you plan for it and painful if you bolt it on. Text expands and contracts by up to thirty percent between languages, so any layout built around one language’s line lengths breaks in the others — headlines wrap awkwardly, buttons overflow, careful spacing collapses.
Building it in from the start means components size themselves to content rather than to a fixed measure, and every string lives in one place instead of being scattered through markup. That is unglamorous engineering, and it is the difference between adding a language in an afternoon and rebuilding the site.
Why the hub is not off-the-shelf software
Generic HR platforms assume a company shaped like the platform. Philippine practices are not — the leave categories, holiday pay rules and thirteenth-month calculations are specific, and the gap between what the software does and what the law requires ends up filled by a spreadsheet someone maintains by hand.
Because this is their own deployment, those rules are encoded rather than approximated. Attendance produces the hours payroll actually uses, and approved leave lands in the right bucket without anyone reconciling two systems at month end.
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