June Calloway, Marfa: a website for a solo architect, built on a self-hosted .NET CMS

For each Raytha use case we take a realistic brief, hand it to an AI agent with the raytha CLI, and publish what comes out: the site, the files behind it, and a kit you can use to rebuild it yourself. This one is a website for a solo architect — not an agency, not a firm with departments, but one licensed architect in Marfa, Texas who designs and draws rammed-earth and desert-modern houses herself.

If you are looking for a self-hosted CMS for an architecture portfolio, a .NET CMS for architects, or a website a solo practitioner can actually keep up to date alone, this is the kind of site that fits: a dated index of drawing sets, field notes from site, transparent process and fees, current availability, and a qualifying inquiry page. Built on a fresh Raytha instance, server-rendered, with no client-side app in the layout.

June Calloway is fictional. The architect, her clients, houses, budgets and job logs are invented, and the site says so on every page. There is no contact form that sends anywhere, no payment, and no client portal — June says plainly that clients get her cell number and a shared folder.

A different kind of architect site

This example was designed from scratch as the opposite of a generic firm site. There is no services grid with icons, no team page (there is no team), no case-study carousel and no portal. Instead the structure follows how a solo practitioner actually wins work in a small desert town:

• The index is the portfolio. Every project is a dated drawing set — built, on the boards, or honestly listed as unbuilt — with drawing number, location, kind, materials and budget.
• Currently. One page says what is on the boards right now, that she is booking spring 2027, and that there are 2 slots. Scarcity is real because capacity is real.
• Field notes, not a blog. Dated job-log entries: a soil test that cracked, standing on a site at 6:42 pm to place a window, a roof that needed more than expected.
• Process and fees on the page. Four phases with fixed-fee ranges, what each phase includes, and what she does not charge for.
• Projects tell the truth. Each drawing set includes constraints, materials, budget, and a written "one regret" — a roof color approved from a screen, a studio door built too narrow for the canvases.
• A qualifying start page. Five things she needs to know — land, budget, size, timeline, why earth — before a first call saves everyone time.

Design: blueprint, not brochure

The design language is a drafting table: monospace type everywhere, squared borders, black on grid paper, and blueprint-blue panels with white line drawings generated by a script — so no real house or person is pictured. One orange dot marks current availability. It is deliberately stark, tabular and a little brutal, because the audience is a homeowner trying to judge whether this person is careful, not whether the homepage is pretty.

Why a solo architect looks for a self-hosted CMS

• You are the marketing department. A portfolio that needs dated projects, notes and an availability page has to be editable in minutes, by one person, without a developer on call.
• You own the record. Houses outlive platforms. Content types, templates and content as files mean the portfolio can be moved, rebuilt or handed to someone else.
• No per-site or per-seat rent. One small site should not carry enterprise licensing. Each site is its own instance, on infrastructure you choose.
• A .NET stack, if that is your world. Raytha is ASP.NET Core with Liquid templates and PostgreSQL — plain HTML and CSS in templates, rendered on the server, working without JavaScript.

Raytha fits solo practitioners and small practices that want to own their stack: the code is open source, the content model is yours, and you can run it on your own infrastructure. If you would rather not run it yourself, Raytha can be fully hosted and managed for you under contract. Where another platform may suit you better is if you need a large plugin marketplace, or an all-in-one marketing suite with CRM and marketing automation built in. For fair comparisons with platforms .NET teams often evaluate, see Raytha vs Kentico, Raytha vs DNN, Raytha vs Umbraco and Raytha vs WordPress.

What is in the kit

Three content types (drawing sets, field notes, questions), site pages for Currently, Process & fees, About, Start and Accessibility, menus and search — all rebuildable with one command from the kit in the examples repository. Route check: 33 routes checked, 0 failed.

One-line summary: a blueprint-styled, first-person website for a fictional solo rammed-earth architect in Marfa, where the portfolio is a dated drawing-set index and availability, fees and regrets are published on purpose.