Larizia
A luxury editorial platform on WordPress, with a custom theme built from scratch.
Larizia is a luxury lifestyle publication, "The Curator of Modern Luxury", covering style, travel, watches and jewellery, beauty, and the business of luxury for an affluent readership. The site publishes long-form articles with bylines and read times, curated roundups under The Edit, and multi-chapter definitive guides on subjects like quiet luxury and watch collecting.
I was engaged to build the platform itself: a WordPress theme written from scratch in PHP, with no page builder and no off-the-shelf base. That covered every public surface, the curated homepage, six editorial section archives, the chaptered Guides format, The Edit, command-palette search, and newsletter capture, plus the content structure editors use to publish it all.
Editorial taxonomy and discovery
Larizia's content is organised into six editorial sections, Style, Travel, Lifestyle, Beauty, Watches & Jewellery, and Industry, plus The Edit and Guides. Each section gets its own archive template: a hero slot for the latest feature, a card grid beneath it, and contextual filters where they make sense (Style, for example, can be filtered by gender). Discovery is layered on top with a popular-searches strip and a numbered trending list, both driven by ordinary WordPress queries rather than a third-party recommendation service.
Chaptered definitive guides
The Guides section behaves differently from standard posts: each guide is a 25–30 minute resource split into eight numbered chapters, with its own landing layout and a 'Read the Guide' entry point. Modelling that in WordPress meant treating a guide as structured content rather than one long post, chapters that can be listed, counted ('+X more chapters'), and navigated in order, with read time aggregated across the whole resource. The result is a format editors can repeat for new topics without touching templates.
Command-palette search
Search opens as a command palette, triggered from the header or with ⌘K, pre-seeded with popular queries like 'quiet luxury watches' and 'Savile Row'. Under the hood it is still WordPress search; the interaction layer on top is a small piece of custom JavaScript, keyboard-first and consistent with the site's restrained visual language. Keeping the script footprint that small was deliberate: the rest of the site is server-rendered PHP, and it doesn't pay for a front-end framework it doesn't need.
Query-driven homepage
The homepage is a stack of distinct editorial modules: a featured hero, a recent-content grid, a numbered trending list, editor's picks, a brand statement, guide promos, and section cards. Each module is a template part with its own WordPress query, so what appears there follows what editors publish and flag, nothing on the page is hardcoded content. That composition also lets the homepage grow with the publication: new sections and formats slot in as additional modules instead of a redesign.
Reading-experience details
Editorial sites live or die on the reading surface, so the small details got engineering attention: read-time estimates computed from the content itself, lazy-loaded article imagery so long card grids don't front-load megabytes of images, a consistent card anatomy (image, category tag, headline, description, date) across every listing, and a typographic system tuned for 6–14 minute long-form pieces. None of it is decorative, each detail either shortens time-to-content or tells readers what they're committing to before they click.
The theme started from an empty folder, not a starter theme. WordPress's template hierarchy does the structural work: archive templates per editorial section, separate single templates for articles and guides, and a library of template parts for the recurring pieces, cards, heroes, trending lists, newsletter blocks, so every surface is assembled from the same vocabulary. The content model separates concerns the same way: standard posts for articles, dedicated structures for chaptered guides and The Edit roundups, and taxonomies that map one-to-one onto the site's navigation.
On the front end I kept the stack deliberately plain: server-rendered PHP, semantic markup, and a thin layer of JavaScript for the command palette and filters. Images are served responsively and lazy-loaded, and editorial metadata like read times is generated at the template level rather than typed by hand. The payoff is operational: editors publish through the normal WordPress admin, and the theme translates that into finished editorial surfaces with no page builder in between.
Larizia now runs as a working luxury publication: six editorial sections carrying long-form coverage with bylines and read times, multi-chapter definitive guides, a curated Edit section, command-palette search, and a weekly newsletter signup, all served by one custom theme. The platform's shape follows its editorial ambition rather than a theme-marketplace template, and the publishing workflow underneath it is still plain WordPress, which is exactly what a small editorial team can sustain.