Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden is unlike almost anywhere else in New York. Eighty-three acres of National Historic Landmark grounds in Staten Island, originally built as a home for retired sailors in the 19th century, now one of the city’s most layered and unexpected cultural destinations.
The campus holds multiple named museums and galleries, the internationally recognized Chinese Scholar’s Garden, a heritage farm, wetlands, outdoor performance venues, and artist residency programs. The grounds include some of the finest Greek Revival architecture in the United States, and the institution has been a cornerstone of Staten Island’s cultural life for generations.
Dreamers of Day rebuilt snug-harbor.org from the ground up. The site serves a genuinely diverse audience, from first-time visitors and professional artists to major donors and venue seekers, all arriving at the same homepage with different needs and different definitions of success.
Rather than flattening that into something generic, we built a platform deep enough to serve every one of them and clear enough that none of them ever feels lost. Getting that balance right, across a content set this wide and an audience this varied, was the central challenge of the project.
The result is a content architecture with layered navigation, a multi-dimensional events calendar, GSAP animations, and a block-based content system that gives the Snug Harbor team genuine editorial control. Built on Dreamers of Day‘s WordPress framework and hosted on WP Engine, it is mobile-first, accessible, and built to serve the institution for the long term.
