Gruppo Toscano

One platform, one language. The client app and design system for Gruppo Toscano's new real estate platform, built together with their in-house IT department.

Responsibilities: Front-end engineering, design system, UI/UX
Stack: Blazor, Bootstrap, Scss, Storybook
Year: 2025

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A new platform, built in-house

Gruppo Toscano is one of Italy's largest real estate networks, with 240 agencies across 13 cities. Its IT department had decided to build a new platform themselves instead of buying one off the shelf. The backend and data side were already underway. What they needed was the part people actually touch: the client app, and a design system to keep it consistent as the platform grew.

I joined as an external partner, working inside their team rather than next to it.

Working with an internal team

An in-house platform outlives any single contributor, so the goal was never just to ship screens. It was to leave behind something the IT department could own, extend and maintain after I stepped back.

That shaped how we worked:

• Shared ownership. Their engineers built the APIs and services. I owned the client and the design system, and we agreed on the contracts between them before writing code on either side.
• Their conventions, not mine. I worked inside their repositories, review process and release cycle, so nothing I built needed translating later.
• Decisions in writing. Component APIs, naming and folder structure were documented as we went, so the reasoning stayed with the team and not just the code.

The design system

A real estate platform repeats the same few things thousands of times: a property, a price, a location, a filter. If each screen draws them differently, the product falls apart. The design system was there to make sure it didn't.

• Tokens first. Colour, type, spacing and radius are defined once, starting from the Gruppo Toscano brand, and every component draws from them.
• Components built for the domain. Not just buttons and inputs, but listing cards, price tags, map markers and search filters, each designed once and reused everywhere.
• Documented for developers. Every component ships with its props, states and usage notes, so the IT team can build new screens without starting from a blank file.

The client app

The app is built around one task: finding the right property.

• Home. A clear entry point into search, with featured listings and the agency network front and centre.
• Search and listings. Filters that keep up with how people actually search (area, price, size, rooms) and results that are easy to compare at a glance.
• Map. Listings on a map that stays in sync with the results list, so moving one updates the other.
• Navigation. A menu that holds the whole platform together, on desktop and on phones.

Engineering

The interesting problems were:

• Map and list in sync. The list always reflects the map results and updates on every map operation, such as panning or zooming.
• Performance on large result sets. Dynamic map filtering that holds up on a large dataset of properties. Filtering and pagination stay in sync without putting unnecessary load on the server.
• A design system that scales with the team. Faithful to the design specs and adaptable to every frontend need. A platform like this needs a rich set of components with a wide range of variants.

Handover

The IT department received the whole design system library, implemented, tested and documented in Storybook, along with the full frontend of the app: developed, working, mobile first and tested across different platforms. I also helped them wire it up to the backend.

Built in-house. Built to last.