Maison Mariette

Maison Mariette in Bierbeek is an old farmhouse, renovated into a place to meet, for work as well as for pleasure. Teams come for meetings, coaching or workshops. Groups of around ten rent the house for a holiday. And families and friends gather there to celebrate. Lisa Boelaert runs it day to day.

Louis met Lisa through Bierbeekse Ondernemers, the local entrepreneurs’ network. It grew into a good working relationship between two businesses from the same village.

Maison Mariette was a brand-new business with no website. Lisa had already done a lot of work: a complete structure in Word, with all the texts and dozens of pages. That’s common when you know your own business inside out: you want to say everything. But then a visitor has to search five pages to find what they need. Louis suggested looking at it from the customer’s side: what does someone who wants to meet, stay or celebrate here need to know? The site was built around those questions, with everything that matters on one page. Lisa loved it straight away.

Each way of using the house got its own page, with its own photos and its own explanation: working together, holidaying together, celebrating together. A team leader planning a working day is, after all, looking for something quite different from a family organising a birthday.

The most important part sits behind the booking button. The form asks straight away for what Lisa needs to make a proposal: the dates, which rooms, which part of the day, how many people, what you plan to do and whether you will stay overnight. Every conversation starts with the right information, without emails going back and forth.

The site is in Dutch and English, with a photo gallery and reviews from guests who have already stayed.