FeatherNote FeatherNote FeatherNote FeatherNote
A digital guest notebook, born in the cottages of Cape Weaver. Scan the code at the front door and the whole house is in your hand: the wifi, the hot tub, the braai, and the best of the village around you. Always the latest version, because it never went to print.
The manual that could never go to print.
Six years of hosting produced manual after manual, and not one ever reached the printer: a new hot tub, a new café, a new house rule, and the file was out of date before the ink was ordered. Guests kept asking the same questions anyway. The fix was never a better manual. It was a manual that stays alive: edited in one place, current at every door, printed never.
It starts at the front door.
A small plaque beside the lock carries one code. The guest points a camera at it and the notebook opens in the browser: no app, no account, no password. Arriving at the cottage and opening the manual are the same gesture. The plaque never changes; the notebook behind it always does.
The plaque at the door · code illustrative
Countryside Cottage
The notebook on a phone · light mode
Everything a guest asks, one thumb away.
The notebook is two lists, and that restraint is the design. House notes answer the questions every guest asks: wifi, the cottage itself, the hot tub, the braai, checkout. Explore carries the village: real places, sorted by simple categories with a colour each, written the way a host talks. Not a directory, not a portal, not an app store. A notebook.
The Greyton pilot is stocked with the real thing: the Saturday market at ten on Market Square, the Boesmanskloof trail permit from the tourism office, the rock pools locals argue about. All of it checked on the ground before it earns a page.
On the coffee table it reads like a magazine.
The same notebook on a tablet becomes the evening read: bigger type, room for the story, light and dark in equal measure. Both modes are first-class; a notebook read by firelight should not glow like a till slip.
Boesmanskloof to Oakes Falls
The Greyton and McGregor classic: fourteen kilometres of kloof, usually walked to Oakes Falls and back. A series of waterfalls with a swimming pool that swallows whole afternoons. Start before seven to beat the heat on the long climb.
The same notebook on a tablet · dark mode · content from the Greyton pilot
Run it from your pocket.
The host's view is the same notebook with the lid off. Create a unit in minutes; duplicate it when the next cottage comes online, because most of the notes (the village, the market, the trails) are already written. Fix a wifi password from the stoep, update the hot tub instructions from the airport. Every edit is live at the door the moment it saves.
That duplication is the expansion plan in miniature: when the next two Greyton units arrive, their notebooks start as copies of the first, and only the house notes change.
Your notebooks
The host view · units, duplication, edits from the phone
Edit once. It is already at the door.
The host writes from any device; the guest reads the latest version, every time, through the same unchanging code. A new wifi password, a new café, a new house rule: fix the note and every future stay is already correct. The thing that killed the printed manual is the thing that powers this one.
“Come, perch a while.”
the Cape Weaver invitation, now with better wifi instructionsCape Weaver
The hospitality brand these cottages belong to, and the six years of hosting that made FeatherNote necessary. The previous case study.