The Fifth House

Overview

My wife started The Fifth House in March 2024 to plan weddings, corporate events and social gatherings. She brought the name: in astrology the fifth house rules romance and celebration, Leo rules it, and she is a Leo. She needed a logo first, then one place to send every lead, on a small budget.

The question

How might we make a one-person studio feel established enough that a couple who found her on a listing books the call?

Approach

Context. She works mostly alone, aiming for three to five clients a month. Couples find her on the Knot and WeddingWire, the big wedding listings, and on Google.

Principles.

• Everything comes from the name: Leo, the sun, gold, a house with a door.
• Show her real events: her footage, her photos, her clients' words.
• Ask before the call: every lead answers a few questions first.

Audience. Couples planning weddings, and companies and nonprofits planning events, around New York.

The logo came out of the name

I drew three passes in Procreate, from word lists to suns to a five inside a house, then three logos. She picked the third: the words in tally strokes with the O as a sun, and a roof over a tally of five. I redrew it in Figma, in her gold.

Start from what the name already means.

Two of the Procreate passes: words, suns and houses in red and green, then the tally-stroke wordmark and the roof mark in blue.

Scrolling walks visitors through the door

A house needs a door. An arch, from my love of Arabic architecture, frames a montage she filmed of her events. As you scroll, it grows and you pass through it into her world. Visitors arrive from listings, comparing planners, so the first screen had to make a small studio feel like a place.

For a one-person service business, the site closes the sale. The listings find the client; the site makes them trust the planner.

The hero on the live site: scroll, and the arch opens onto her montage.

Each kind of event became a tarot card

The astrology led to tarot: the Lovers for weddings, the Sun for corporate, the World for social, the Star for nightlife. Over six sessions I art-directed about 460 ChatGPT images down to simple line art. She later swapped the AI art for photos of her own events, betting real photos would earn more trust, and dropped nightlife.

A strong brand adapts when the art changes.

Each 2024 line-art card beside the photo card that replaced it: weddings, corporate, social.

The form screens before the call

A poor-fit consultation costs her time. We chose the form's fields together: event type, date, guest count, budget, the dream event, and how they heard about us. She reads the answers before each call. The "how did you hear" answers showed the Knot and WeddingWire were working, so the ad money moved there.

The intake form screens both ways. Asking budget, guest count, and the dream event before the call means planner and client both arrive knowing if it is a fit.

The footer of the live site: the intake form, the last question asks how they heard.

Takeaways

In January 2026 I set up Google Search Console, Google Analytics and a Business Profile so Google could find the site and count a sent form. Since then about 80 inquiries have come in, roughly nine a month.

See it live at thefifth.house.

What I'd change: give the form its own thank-you page from day one. The site is one page, and a sent form only showed a popover, so Google had nothing to count until January.