Cartier's Le Chœur des Pierres melts photos into gouache
makemepulse built Cartier's high jewellery site on one transition: each photograph bleeds away to reveal the gouache drawing the piece began as.
Cartier's Le Chœur des Pierres shows its high jewellery the way a jeweller first sees it: as a gouache drawing on paper. Every piece starts as a photograph, and the photograph bleeds away in watercolour blots until the painted design underneath is all that's left. makemepulse built it, and it took awwwards Site of the Day on 20 October 2026 with a 7.51, plus a Developer Award at 7.84.
It's a luxury brand site with almost nothing on it. Two stones, one title, a sound toggle. That restraint is what lets the one big idea carry the whole thing.
Two stones and a choice
The opening screen is a sapphire and an emerald, both cut as sugarloaf cabochons, lying on grey silk. The title sits under them in a condensed serif with the small words set in italic: Le CHŒUR, des PIERRES, then CHAPTER II in small capitals. No navigation pitch, no product grid.
Move the cursor and a ring follows it with "Choose a stone". Hover the sapphire and a soft blue halo blooms around it while the label changes to "Discover Stellara". The emerald does the same in green for Panthère Tunya. You pick a stone before you see a single necklace, which is how a commission at this level works: the stone comes first and the jewel is designed around it.
Photographs that melt into gouache
Click a stone and the screen fills with the finished piece, photographed on a saturated ground: Stellara on deep blue, Panthère Tunya on green. Wait a second and holes open in the photograph. They spread like water dropped on wet paper, soft-edged and grainy, and through them you see the same necklace painted in gouache on grey card.
This is the gouache transition, and it's the reason the site won. A gouaché is the hand-painted design drawing Cartier's studio makes before a piece goes to the workshop, at actual size, with the stones painted in. makemepulse made those drawings the ground the whole experience stands on. The photograph is the surface. The drawing is what's under it.
The blots are the right shape for it, too. A hard wipe or a crossfade would have read as a slideshow. The irregular, pigment-like edges look like the medium they're revealing.
The drawing keeps its studio marks
Look closely at the painted Panthère Tunya. The construction lines are still there, thin graphite rules crossing at the centre stone. In the top right corner there's an embossed Cartier stamp, Paris Londres New York, the kind pressed onto archive drawings. They'd have been easy to clean up for a polished render. Left in, they make the drawing read as a document from the studio's drawers.
The type stays out of the way. Each piece gets its name in wide, spaced capitals with "Scroll to discover" and a small circled arrow under it. Then a single serif line takes the whole screen: "Cartier celebrates the centre stone through this spectacular necklace."
Editorial pacing on scroll
Scroll and the site turns into a magazine story. Each stone gets one fact at a time: a 41.01-carat Ceylon sapphire for Stellara, a 48.12-carat Zambian emerald for Panthère Tunya. The Stellara text drowns in a wash of navy ink before the next line arrives. The Panthère Tunya photograph slides up as a full-width band, then shrinks into a portrait print next to a short paragraph, set like a spread in a printed catalogue.
The numbers do the selling. A carat weight and an origin say more about these pieces than any adjective could, and the site gives each one a whole screen.
What other luxury sites can take from it
The lesson is portable. Find the material your client already makes in private, the sketches, the samples, the drawings, and build the interface out of it. Cartier has painted gouachés for over a century. makemepulse took that language from the archive and gave it a transition.
