Case study · 2026
Café 't Huchie
Café 't Huchie is the kind of place where the billiard table matters more than the branding. The site had to feel the same way: warm, unfussy, and easy for the owners to keep up to date themselves, from tonight's opening hours to the next Libre tournament.
- Role
- Design & Development
- Client
- Café 't Huchie, Veenendaal
- Year
- 2026
What I did
- Web design
- Frontend development
- Payload CMS
- Self-hosted deploy
- Accessibility
Café 't Huchie has stood on the Nieuweweg in Veenendaal since 1897. Two billiard tables, a dartboard, a cabinet full of trophies and a regular crowd that knows exactly which chair is theirs. What it did not have was a website that could keep up with the week.
The design starts from the room itself. Photography of the actual bar carries every page, set in a dark, warm palette with the café's own gold as the single accent. Type is set large and plain, because the site is read on phones, at the bar, by people who mostly want to know whether the door is open.
Everything an owner changes in a normal week is content, not code: opening hours (which drive the 'open today' bar at the top of every page), the menu with prices, the tournament schedule, the photo grid and the history page. It runs on Next.js 16 with Payload CMS 4 and PostgreSQL, self hosted in a single Docker container on a Coolify server, and ships with its own handbook site that explains each screen of the CMS in plain Dutch.
Een goed café om de hoek is beter dan een verre brouwerij.
The photo grid on the homepage, where the room does the selling. Tournaments, with the yearly Libre competition up front. The history page, running back to 1897.