Work · Case study

VTM Berango

A home starts with understanding.

Web designDigital identityCustom formSocial housing 2026

Architectural render of a VTM Berango residential building. — Architectural render of the VTM Berango building.

The brief

At Arana 12, in Berango, Nera Homes is building eleven municipal price-capped rental homes. A one- or two-bedroom flat with a garage, a storage unit, geothermal heating and underfloor heating, for anyone who has been on the town register for at least three years and earns between 15,000 and 50,000 euros a year.

The hard part of an allocation like this is not the flat: it is the procedure. Income bands, scoring criteria, a deadline, an official gazette and an application that has to be signed. They asked us for the page that turns an administrative file into something you can read in five minutes, in Spanish and Basque, and that collects the applications as well.

What we did

We treated the development as a public file, not as an estate agent’s campaign. Gazette navy, one render of the building and not a single other photograph: floor plans, two pages of the Bizkaia Official Gazette and icons. Nobody lands here to daydream about a flat; they land here to check whether they qualify.

We put all the money in one table. Eleven homes across five income bands, with the floor area, the terrace and the expected service charge. It is the hardest piece to lay out and the first thing people look for: everyone finds their row and their column without having to ring anyone.

We built the form from scratch, in a plugin of our own. Five steps with a progress bar — applicant, partner, household, home and signature — fields that only appear when they are needed, and validation before sending. Anyone who prefers paper can download the PDF; the short way is here.

Bilingual inside the field itself. The site runs in Spanish and Basque, but on an official application switching language is not enough: every label carries both languages together — “Primer apellido / Lehenengo deitura” — so that nobody has to choose. Design, website and development, all ours, between March and April 2026.

The design decision

From requirements to application.

The decision was not about style, it was about tone. A price-capped housing scheme lives or dies on nobody suspecting there is small print, so the site looks like an official gazette: navy blue, one table and a single red, kept for “Inscríbete”. The render and the floor plans are there to place you, not to persuade you.

The project in numbers

municipal price-capped rental homes

income bands in the price table

steps in the application form

languages in every label of the form

years on the town register needed to apply

single page for the whole procedure

How it's built

Underneath there is a WordPress with our own child theme and a colour system declared by hand in the stylesheet: #1B2A4A for the institutional navy, #F8F9FA for the section background, #333333 for the text. The red that actually paints the “Inscríbete / Erregistratu” button is #D30A0A, and it turns up seventy-three times across the whole document: it is the only place where the site raises its voice. One single type family, Montserrat, with headings at 20/30 in caps and body text at 18/27.

The grid is deliberately narrow — 1,140 px of content, with a single wide band at 1,600 — and the reference radius is 6 px, which is what the eighty-one form fields and cards carry. The steps are marked with full circles; the header button, by contrast, is almost square.

The development work is the application plugin. It runs the five steps with their progress bar, shows the “Partner” block only if a spouse has been declared, and validates before letting anyone sign. The rest of the bilingualism runs through WPML, with hreflang declared in Spanish, Basque and x-default.

How it went

01The briefEleven homes, a scoring system and a deadline running

02The decisionRead like an official gazette, not like an advert

03The tableEleven homes across five income bands

04The formOur own five-step plugin, bilingual field by field

Gallery · the project in pictures (click to enlarge)

Five steps, official-bulletin tone.

The online application follows the order of the official bulletin: applicant, partner, household, home and signature, every question in Spanish and Basque. Recorded on 26 September 2026 with demo data and nothing submitted; by then the website was already publishing the provisional list of admitted and excluded applicants.

1 · Applicant
2 · Partner
3 · Household
4 · Home
5 · Signature (not submitted)

vtmberango.nerahomes.com · The five steps of the form, with demo data and nothing submitted. Actual recording, 26 September 2026.

Open film ↗

The whole process fits on one page: render, official gazette and form.

The form's Circunstancias / Egoera block: six residence and employment conditions for Berango, each with its Basque translation in grey underneath and a Sí / No pair; at the end, the spouse question with the NO and SÍ / BAI buttons — Every question in Spanish and Basque inside the same field.

Eleven homes, five income bands, no small print.

The price table by income band, the scaled floor plans and the paper option all live on the same page as the form.

A table listing the eleven flats (1A to 3C, Ático A and Ático B), their enclosed and terrace square metres and the rent for each of the five income bands, plus the service charge; below it, the list of costs that charge covers — Eleven homes across five income bands, with no small print.

The Las viviendas section: two floor plans drawn in navy on white, one one-bedroom and one two-bedroom, the terrace hatched in pink and the furniture drawn to scale — One bedroom or two, drawn to scale.

The Tienes dos maneras de inscribirte block with its navy Inscripción online and Descargar PDF buttons, and the start of the Solicitud de Inscripción with five numbered steps on a progress bar — Online or on paper: anyone who would rather not fill it in here takes the PDF.

Spanish and Basque, the same page.

Basque is not a second-class translation: it is the same page, built with WPML, also on a narrow screen.

The site's /eu/ version: the same building render headlined Eman ezazu izena hemen Berangon alokairu babestu bat eskatzeko, with the 11 udal-etxebizitza tasatu kicker and the Eman ezazu izena button — Spanish and Basque, on WPML and the same layout.

Basque is not a second-class translation: it is the same page.

Three phones in a row: the home page with the render and the Inscríbete button, the price table restacked vertically, and the form with its five numbered steps — The table and the form work on a narrow screen too.

"En Berango, en Arana 12, se halla tu nueva vivienda Tasada de Alquiler Protegido"vtmberango.nerahomes.com

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