L'Hermitage — ECOLISE European Demonstrator

In late 2025, ECOLISE — the European network of community-led initiatives on climate — selected fifteen places across five countries, out of nearly 70 applications, to become the demonstrators of its Regenerative Communities Fund, co-funded by the European Union (DEAR programme). L'Hermitage, a 30-hectare rural third place in Autrêches in the Oise, is one of them. That European mandate deserved more than a press release: it needed a dedicated site able to explain the commitment to very different audiences — local residents, public authorities, companies, researchers and the fourteen other places in the network.

I designed and built a one-page site with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, structured as a narrative: the European commitment (who ECOLISE is, what a demonstrator is, the journey "from Brussels to Autrêches"), the 3Zero compass — zero exclusion, zero carbon, zero poverty —, the mission in three moves (experiment, share, inspire), the living laboratory, and then the six open worksites: hospitality, cooperation, agroecology, forest, social innovation and training. Each worksite is backed by a concrete figure from the place — 100+ beds, 100 cooperative members, 22 hectares of sustainably managed forest — staying true to the spirit of the place: proof through the field, not through rhetoric.

On the technical side, the page is fully prerendered and served statically from Vercel: anchor-based navigation, optimized and preloaded images, careful SEO and Open Graph metadata. The mandatory European co-funding notices (Funding Fairer Futures project, DEAR programme) are included in line with the fund's requirements.

The site slots into L'Hermitage's web ecosystem, which I've been growing project after project — main site, treasure hunt, retreats landing page — and closes the journey with three graded calls to action: visit the place, organise an offsite, build a partnership.