Entscheidungen — dossier

Decisions — lead build (Markstein AG)

No contact with the business yet. Per SKILL.md's lead-mode rule, every open question below was

resolved with a recommended default instead of a blocking question, and is called out here as an

override point for whoever picks up this lead.

Target business: Markstein AG (real-estate agency, HQ Haselstrasse 16, 5400 Baden; branch Löwenstrasse 40, 8001 Zürich) — not the mueligasse-doettingen.ch single-project microsite the operator originally linked. That domain turned out to be a one-off marketing page for a specific Döttingen development built by Markstein AG's marketing team (contact: Andrea Koch), not a standalone business. Confirmed with the operator via AskUserQuestion before starting; Baden was chosen as the primary Google listing over Zürich because it has more reviews (74 vs 20) and its phone prefix (056) matches the Müligasse microsite's contact number — evidence it's the HQ.

DE (primary) + EN. markstein.ch itself is German-only, but two of five Google reviews explicitly praise English-language service to non-native-German clients — a live buyer/investor need. [TBD: confirm with operator; could add FR given Swiss market reach.]

The category spec calls for featured listings on the homepage. Markstein's live listings change daily and aren't ours to scrape/republish as fact. Decision: no fabricated property cards. Homepage shows illustrative property-type categories (Eigentumswohnungen, Einfamilienhäuser, Renditeliegenschaften, Neubauprojekte) with an "current listings on request / via our team" pattern instead of specific units, addresses, or prices. Flagged as [TBD: connect real listings feed] in copy and TODO.md.

Markstein AG has ~35 staff publicly listed by name on markstein.ch. Decision: represent leadership + department heads by name/title only (already public), no fabricated bios, no photos (rights unverified — see cautions.md). Full staff directory is not reproduced.

Source site claims to be "one of the five leading real estate service providers in Switzerland" with no citation. Decision: soften to "among Switzerland's established real estate groups" rather than repeat an unsourced ranking. Revisit if the operator can substantiate the claim.

Brand DNA extracted from markstein.ch: warm grey #8E929B + deep wine/burgundy #8E202B on a near-white #EEEEEE/white ground, thin-weight uppercase display type with wide tracking (NeueHelveticaPro), and a distinctive house-silhouette (pentagon) motif used as a photo-mask/overlay shape across the site. Decision: carry the pentagon-house motif forward as the site's signature shape (it's the one truly distinctive brand asset, worth keeping even though the rest of the current site is generic Elementor/Bootstrap) — reinterpreted more confidently for a sophisticated feel, not copied pixel-for-pixel. Full rationale in brand/styleguide.md.

The first pass was built on a thin extraction: site-extractor only captured markstein.ch's

homepage, so the site had no real service copy, no proof points, and no imagery. Re-done properly.

Deep extraction. Pulled all six sitemaps (pages, posts, references, properties, investor

offers, jobs) and read the real service pages directly. This surfaced the material the first

build was missing — see content/identity.md "Hard facts" and "Brand voice".

Real proof numbers now carry the site: 20 Jahre Erfahrung · über 55'000 Kundenadressen ·

~CHF 1 Mrd. verwaltetes Immobilienvermögen · 2 Standorte, plus "Provisionierung bei Erfolg —

ohne Verkaufserfolg gibt es keine Rechnung von uns". All published by Markstein themselves.

A dark stats band sits directly under the hero; for a real-estate agency this is the single

highest-value block on the page, and v1 had nothing like it.

Real brand voice recovered: "Vertrauen schafft Grosses" (the motto, now the hero eyebrow and

the footer line), "Mehr als nur ein Immobiliendienstleister", "Von Profis für Profis",

"Wohn(t)räume", "Das gute Gefühl, den richtigen Partner an Bord zu haben". v1 invented

serviceable German; v2 uses theirs.

Photography. Downloaded Markstein's own architecture and interior photography via their open

WordPress media API (Müntzberg villa, Segelhof, Konnexio, Glasi, Katzenstein, Römerstrasse).

Rights are unverified — flagged in content/cautions.md; this is a pitch mock-up of their own

site, and the images would be re-licensed or replaced before any real go-live.

New page: Referenzen. A real-estate agency lives on its references; six real projects with

photos and disciplines. This is the biggest structural gap v1 had.

Visual direction changed from flat burgundy/grey pentagon panels to full-bleed architectural

photography with a two-layer scrim, zero border-radius, hairline rules and numbered editorial

rows. The pentagon house-silhouette survives but as a precise photo mask used once or twice per

page, not as a large colour fill. Palette stepped back (bone #FBF9F6, near-black #14110F)

so the buildings carry the page; gold #B08D57 added because burgundy dies on dark photos.

Rejected: the lifestyle stock photography on markstein.ch today (smiling couples, family by

a pond). Generic and interchangeable; their architecture photography is the distinctive asset.

check-tokens.mjs: clean, 0 violations (42 files scanned) after routing breakpoints/grid thresholds/decorative values through tokens-ok exceptions or layout tokens.
check-distinctiveness.mjs vs the 5 most recent client sites — two soft colour warnings, both kept:
primary #8E202B within 36 RGB units of rm-beauty-lounge's #6B1F32. #8E202B is Markstein's actual logo colour, sampled from markstein.ch — not invented, and not negotiable for a brand-faithful build. Different category, different typography, different layout.
accent #B08D57 within 34 units of institut-de-beaute-…'s #c9a352. A muted gold is the standard legible accent on dark photography; it appears here only on eyebrows/links over images, at small sizes, never as a fill.
Hero layout is genuinely novel in the set: full-bleed-photo-scrim-bottom-left against five variants of left-text-photo-right / arch-photo layouts. Type pairing (Fraunces display + Public Sans), the zero-radius architectural surfaces, the dark stats band, and the pentagon photo mask have no analogue in the recent five.

No domain decision from the operator yet. Decision: deploy to a Cloudflare Pages review preview only (markstein-ag.pages.dev or similar) under the sitecheck-projects GitHub org, private repo. No custom domain, no contact with the business, no claim of any listing — this is an unsolicited pitch build.