Our work on Best Cellars alongside the Rockwell Group gave us the opportunity to help bring a genuinely original retail concept to life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From the moment we engaged with Rockwell Group’s design intent, it was clear this wasn’t a conventional wine shop build. The client, Best Cellars, had a bold and simple idea — strip away everything that made wine shopping feel intimidating and replace it with something honest, approachable, and visually engaging. Our job was to make sure that idea didn’t get lost in the build.

Rockwell Group is known for approaching every project through the lens of storytelling. As a firm, they operate at the intersection of theater and architecture, and that sensibility was evident throughout the design documents for Best Cellars. The interior wasn’t just organized — it was choreographed. Our role as the contractor was to execute that vision with the kind of precision that made the architecture disappear into the experience, so that a customer walking through the door felt the design without thinking about it.

The centerpiece of the build was the custom plywood display system with LED back-lit panels — a deceptively simple concept that demanded exacting execution. The display walls needed to read as clean, modern, and warm all at once, and achieving that required tight coordination between our millwork, lighting, and finish trades. The plywood had to be selected, detailed, and installed to a tolerance that held up under the direct backlighting. Any inconsistency in the material or the joinery would have been immediately visible. We took that seriously.

The LED panels themselves were integrated directly into the display system to illuminate each of the store’s eight taste categories from behind, creating a glowing wall of wine bottles that served as the store’s primary visual identity. That effect — warm, inviting, and legible from across the room — was only achievable through close coordination between our team and Rockwell Group’s designers, who were precise about the quality of light, the depth of the reveals, and the way the whole system came together as a unified surface.

What set this project apart was that the design solution was also the brand identity. Rockwell Group didn’t design a container for Best Cellars’ merchandise — they designed a system that was the store. That meant consistency across every detail mattered enormously, because this same system would need to be repeatable at future locations. We understood from the outset that we weren’t just building one shop — we were helping establish a prototype. That raised the standard for everything we did on site.

Working with Rockwell Group is a collaborative process in the best sense. They bring strong design direction and they hold to it, which is exactly what you want when the concept is as considered as this one was. Our responsibility was to meet that standard in the field — to problem-solve in real time without compromising the integrity of what the architects put on paper. On Best Cellars, we’re proud to say we did.