Monstarlab designed and built the new ohny.org for Open House New York (OHNY). Every October, OHNY opens more than 300 buildings, tunnels, workshops and rooftops across the five boroughs to the public, and more than 50,000 people take part. During those three days, ohny.org is the festival's main hub, where people find the lineup, use the map, reserve tickets and check for changes to a site's hours.
For the rest of the year, the site is an editorial publication with essays on architecture, interviews with the people who maintain the city, and a calendar of smaller programs. It has a steady, loyal audience and is run by a small team.
When we began working together in the summer of 2025, the goal was a single site that could serve both purposes well. Many organizations face a version of this, from retailers during the holidays to ticketing companies on release day, where a few busy weeks shape what people need from the site but it still has to work for the rest of the year.
Designing for every season
A site designed only around its busiest period can feel empty the rest of the year, with festival features still on the page and nothing in them. We wanted ohny.org to feel right in March as well as in October.
In our discovery workshop with OHNY staff, partners and festival-goers, the top-voted problem was that the old site looked the same all year. We designed the two modes as separate states of the same system. OHNY's admins can switch banners, colors, labels and homepage layouts to signal where the organization is in its year: regular programming, pre-festival build-up, or the festival itself. The same library of nearly 60 custom components supports every mode, with different parts brought forward depending on the time of year.
Connecting the site to the tools the team already uses
OHNY's festival team was already managing 300+ sites in Airtable: hosts, hours, accessibility details, ticketing status. The old workflow meant re-entering that data into the website by hand, during the busiest weeks of the year.
We connected Airtable directly to the site, so when the festival team updates a record, the listing on ohny.org updates with it. The team doesn't have to learn a second system or copy data over during festival season. This does mean the website is only as accurate as the Airtable base behind it, so data quality now sits with the festival team. OHNY chose that deliberately, because the team already owns that data and wanted to keep it that way.
Giving editors control of their own pages
OHNY's staff told us early on that they wanted to publish without waiting on a developer. We built 35+ page templates on Builder.io, a visual CMS, so their editors can create new pages themselves. Not every page will match the original designs exactly, and the OHNY team was comfortable with that in exchange for being able to publish on their own schedule.
Making accessibility part of the experience
The site was built to WCAG 2.0 AA standards from the start. Beyond that, every festival listing includes its accessibility details, and visitors can filter the full lineup by them. For a festival whose mission is opening the city to everyone, that filter is as important as the map.
Looking ahead to OHNY Weekend
The new site launched this spring, and OHNY Weekend 2026 is the first festival it will support. Our team will be working alongside OHNY's staff through the weekend, and we look forward to sharing how visitors used the site once it's over.
If your organization has a busy season and needs a website that works well both then and the rest of the year, we'd be glad to talk.
Email Max Oglesbee at max.oglesbee@monstar-lab.com.