Mohonk Mountain House has been welcoming guests to its Victorian castle in New Paltz, New York, for more than 155 years. Its website had to communicate an experience that is at once expansive and intimate: a place for multi-generational traditions, ambitious outdoor adventure, serious dining, and the occasional game of Scrabble.
Tractorbeam: How do you build a new website for a 155-year-old Victorian castle?
Julie Anderson, Senior Product Manager: Step by step. We involved Mohonk early and secured their buy-in throughout. This is a company that has used the same pattern on its curtains and carpet for 150-plus years, so honoring that legacy mattered. At the same time, they came to us ready to solve real problems.
John Reynolds, Creative Director of Digital Products: One of the most remarkable parts was that there was rarely a hard “no.” Tractorbeam’s Digital Marketing team had already been a longtime partner to Mohonk, so there was trust in the room before the website work began. That history gave us a strong understanding of the business and how guests were already finding and using the site. Mohonk trusted us to bring a perspective, but they were also deeply involved in shaping where it went. It felt like the timing was right: they had a strong history, a strong point of view and a willingness to make the digital experience live up to both.
Brad Walcher, Director of Digital Products: Before we could design much of anything, we had puzzles to solve. We had to look at the language they used, the way they categorized programs and what those categories meant to guests. Our first design reviews were really about helping them solve business problems so we could organize the experience in a way that made sense digitally.
A good example was the question of “day guests.” Mohonk wanted to distinguish people visiting for the day from overnight guests, but the label itself felt reductive. We shifted the language to the experience: “day experience” and “stay experience.”
No one has to be defined by what they are not. It made the site feel more natural, and it gave guests a clearer way into the property.
TB: What did Mohonk need the new site to do?
JA: Their old platform had become difficult to maintain. They have signature events nearly every weekend, a large activities schedule and people across the property who need to make updates. There was no useful out-of-the-box solution for that.
The new site needed to be flexible with the experience. The person responsible for rowboats, hikes or yoga classes can update what they need to update without having access to every part of the site. We built a bigger boat.
BW: The larger goal was that the website needed to match the physical experience. Mohonk is breathtaking in person, we needed to make that part of the offering easy to understand. We wanted to give them a genuinely useful digital product that reflected their history and reputation.
TB: Where did you start?
BW: With people. For a project like this, several departments have a stake in the site and an opinion about how it affects their work. For Mohonk, we tripled our usual interview subjects, followed by a workshop with another group of subject-matter experts from dining, vacation planning, concierge, front desk, sales and activities.
We asked them what guests were asking for, what they were worried about and where they got stuck. Then we brought the findings back to Mohonk: here is what we heard, and here is how we can address it. That gave us real-world problems to solve rather than assumptions to design around.
JA: It also meant people could see themselves in the process. When it came time to make decisions, the recommendations were grounded in what their own teams had told us.
JR: Visiting the property was essential, too. All three of us were new to Mohonk, so we were able to notice what a first-time guest notices: what we wanted to know, what was easy to find and what remained a mystery. It is such a broad experience, with so many possible paths through it. You cannot fully understand that from a screen.
TB: What did you learn about the guest?
BW: Tractorbeam’s Digital Marketing team had years of performance data and ongoing insight into how guests were using Mohonk’s existing site: click behavior, heat maps, campaign performance and the questions people were trying to answer. That established knowledge was invaluable, but it could only tell us so much. We also wanted generative research, a clearer view of what guests needed before we decided how the website should respond.
One of the useful insights was that guests fell across two spectrums: active versus relaxed. People who plan and people who want to discover. Those things do not neatly correlate. Someone may plan every detail and still want a restful stay. Someone else may arrive with no agenda and want to be active from the minute they get there.
That became the basis for our personas.
JR: It turns a broad audience into a human being with a point of view. You can say, “How does Mary experience this?” instead of designing for the way you personally travel. What does she need to know before she arrives? What reassures her?
JA: They were also useful in the room. When we explained a design decision, we could point back to the research and say, “This works for someone like Mary.” It gave the client team a shared language for considering a new approach.
TB: How did that research shape the structure of the site?
BW: The question Mohonk received most often over the phone was, “What’s included?” That had become their second-most visited page after the homepage, which told us something.
We reorganized the experience around the paths guests were actually trying to take. The day experience and stay experience sections make the differences clear, and day passes show exactly what is included. The goal was to help people choose with confidence without flattening the richness of the property.
JR: There are 155 years of history in that content. We had to respect it, understand what it is doing, then put it in the right place.
TB: And visually, how did you balance Mohonk’s history with a more modern web experience?
JR: We wanted to bring people there without giving everything away. Mohonk has an extraordinary archive, including old sketches, drawings and a full-time archivist who cares for it. The site carries that through small details: illustration, texture and a fog effect in the header, while still making the practical information easy to find.
BW: Warmth and clarity can coexist. The site does not need to feel like a museum to honor what Mohonk has been. It needs to make the next visit feel possible.
TB: What does the site make possible for Mohonk now?
JA: It gives their team more control and more room to evolve. The programming will change. The seasons will change. The site is built to evolve, giving content teams the flexibility to add and update without reworking the larger experience.
JR: It also makes room for the guest experience to continue once someone is on property. We created a guest dashboard as a practical digital companion: what is happening in the next few hours, what might be worth knowing, where to go next.
Mohonk has always been about connection between people. They do not have televisions in the rooms; they have Scrabble games. So even the digital tools have to serve the larger experience, not distract from it.
BW: That is the real measure of the work. The technology should help Mohonk be more Mohonk, making an already remarkable place easier to experience, easier to manage and easier to return to.
