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Spruce Tower

Marketing site and gym renders for a Philadelphia apartment building.

Summer 2024 · Visualization · Completed client project

Spruce Tower project composite — historic brown-brick Philadelphia apartment building on the left, two photorealistic gym render angles on the right, and a dark Spruce Tower logo card with gold line-art mark overlaid in the center
The building, the mark, and the gym renders in one frame.

Stack

Stack: React · Tailwind · Blender · DreamHost · JavaScript

Four days on site to build a React marketing site and render the gym in Blender for one client.

Log

  1. Day 1 — drive up

    Math exam at 8 AM, dropped the textbook at home, picked up Alex, CRV pointed northeast. "light years" by John Summit on CarPlay, guardrail and rolling farmland past the windshield for hours, then Philadelphia City Hall framed dead-center as the city closed in.

    Photo from inside the family Honda CR-V on the highway up to Philly — dashboard screen on Apple CarPlay playing 'light years' by John Summit while a FedEx truck and green roadside trees pass outside the windshield
    CarPlay, John Summit, farmland out the windshield.
    Photo through the windshield approaching Philadelphia City Hall — Broad Street traffic leading toward the clock tower under heavy clouds, framed by tall Center City buildings
    City Hall dead ahead. The trip became real there.

  2. Day 1 — meet the building

    Got the keys, walked the block. Spruce Tower is a tall historic brown-brick apartment building on a Center City corner — many windows, ornate cornice, gold line-art building silhouette on a dark grey logo card. The brief was the brand: keep it serif, keep it gold, photograph the brick.

    Exterior photo of Spruce Tower — tall historic brown-brick apartment building on a Center City Philadelphia corner, with ornate cornice details, rows of white-trim windows, and blue sky overhead
    The building and the mark.

  3. Day 2 — gym in Blender

    Measured the amenities room in the morning, pushed it into a grey untextured Blender viewport the rest of the day. Two treadmills against the windows, dumbbell rack along the wall, weight bench, mirror. No textures, no lights — just geometry that matched the room.

    Blender viewport screenshot of the Spruce Tower gym model — grey untextured room with two treadmills by the windows, cable machine, bench, dumbbell rack, mirror, ceiling lights, and camera selected in the outliner
    Day 2: just the geometry.

  4. Day 3 — photoreal renders

    Lit the scene with the real gym photo as a reference. The actual room had a mirror, dumbbell rack, bench, green turf, and hard ceiling panels; the Blender render recreated that layout.

    Photo of the real Spruce Tower gym — bright white room with mirrored wall, cable machine, weight bench, dumbbell rack, exercise bike, green turf, and pale green wall graphics
    The real amenity room.
    Photorealistic Blender render of the Spruce Tower gym — black weight bench in the foreground, dumbbell rack and mirror behind it, ceiling light panels above, and treadmills reflected in the mirror
    A Blender render of the same room.

  5. Day 4 — React homepage

    React + Tailwind. Homepage hero looking straight up the brick from the street, serif title overlay: "WELCOME TO SPRUCE TOWER APARTMENTS. HISTORIC CHARM MEETS MODERN LIVING IN CENTER CITY." Brand carried — gold accents, dark slate type, the renders dropped into the amenities section below.

    sprucetower.com homepage hero screenshot — dark navigation bar with Spruce Tower logo and leasing links over a low-angle building photo, with large white overlay text reading 'WELCOME TO SPRUCE TOWER APARTMENTS' and 'HISTORIC CHARM MEETS MODERN LIVING IN CENTER CITY'
    sprucetower.com — the homepage hero.

  6. Day 4 — interactive Center City map

    Built a togglable map of the surrounding blocks for the leasing pitch — pins for Restaurants, Coffee, Bars, Parking, and Hospitals, each filterable from a row of category chips. The point: prove the neighborhood without making anyone leave the page.

    sprucetower.com interactive neighborhood map screenshot — Google map centered around Spruce Street with colored pins, Spruce Tower marker, and a right-side panel listing Restaurants plus collapsed Coffee, Bars, Parking, and Hospitals sections
    Neighborhood, on the page.

  7. Ship — DNS and drive home

    Pushed the React build to DreamHost, pointed sprucetower.com at it, handed over the renders. Drove home with a live URL on my phone.

Gallery

Spruce Tower logo card — dark gray rectangle with a stylized gold line-art building silhouette and 'SPRUCE TOWER' in spaced serif type
The mark, in isolation.
sprucetower.com Gallery section screenshot — Spruce Tower navigation above a section titled 'The Spruce Lifestyle' with city-view photography and interior apartment and lobby images below
The website gallery section.

Result

Paid client project · 4 days · site + gym renders shipped

What I learned

Two disciplines for one client in four days bought what a single deliverable wouldn't have — the marketing site needed an amenities section, and the Blender renders gave me another way to show the gym alongside its photo. The scope was small, but the framing wasn't: a road trip with a friend turned into seed capital, and the next contract was easier to ask for because this one had a live URL attached to it.

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