Cellar Creations is the specialist cellar division of First Impressions Projects, a registered Australian building and design practice — applying thirty years of high-end design and construction to a single thing, and supplying that expertise to clients across New Zealand, Australia and internationally.
A cellar is not a piece of joinery. It’s a small building inside a building — and for a joiner, a cabinetmaker or a head contractor it’s an occasional job among many. It’s the only job we do. Cellar Creations is the specialist cellar division of First Impressions Projects, a registered design and building practice with more than thirty years in high-end residential and commercial construction.
A cellar lives on the parts you can’t see — the climate, the insulation, the vapour barrier, the structural fixing, the way the weight of the wine travels down through the racking. Those are the parts a builder is trained to get right, and they’re the reason a cellar is a building problem before it’s a joinery one.
Being a registered building and design practice isn’t a claim to superiority. It’s what lets us be useful.
We speak three languages: design, building and wine. We read an architect’s drawings, we understand a builder’s program, and we know what a collector is trying to protect. Whatever your relationship to the project, we speak your language — and we collaborate, because a cellar done right is a win for everyone at the table. As a fellow designer, builder and wine lover, we understand your brief and are ready to collaborate.
The same experience tells us something else: aesthetic and cost have to be reconciled early, or the project suffers. That’s why every project starts with a scope of works and a feasibility study — what the room will take, and what it will cost — so the client, the design team, the builder and we are all working to the same expectation before anything is committed.
After that, we listen. Then we collaborate.
Nothing in our range came off a shelf. Five of our eleven systems — Shoji, Straight Concave, Curved Concave, Curved Straight and Cellar Tech — were designed in-house by Robert Rolls and exist nowhere else. The rest work in more traditional forms, but they are no less ours: the joinery, the proportion, the setting-out and the detail are all our own, drawn and redrawn across three decades of building them.
That refining doesn’t stop. We’re always working on a detail, a technique, a way of making a join disappear. It’s the part of the work that never really finishes.
But we’ve never thought of design as something that happens in isolation. Every design is referenced from somewhere — from nature, from boat-building, from a Japanese screen, from work that came before and did something well. Originality is what you do with the reference, not the absence of one.
We collaborate — genuinely. New designs, new constraints, a room we haven’t seen before: that’s the part of the work we look forward to. Bring us the idea and we’ll find the way to build it.
Which is why our door is open. We work with architects, interior designers, building designers, builders, homeowners and collectors — and the best cellars we’ve built have come from being told something we hadn’t thought of. We bring three decades of knowing what timber will and won’t do, and a workshop that can make almost anything. You bring the room, the collection and the idea.
The cellar is what happens between the two.
Cellar Creations is led by Robert Rolls — a registered Australian builder and designer, and the designer of five of the systems in our range.
Robert was born in Timaru, before establishing First Impressions Projects in Australia, where Cellar Creations now designs and builds cellars for clients across New Zealand, Australia and internationally.
Thirty years of award-winning design and construction, twenty of them in cellars specifically.
First Impressions Projects has won more than thirty industry awards across three decades of design and building in Australia.
Registered Domestic Builder, Registered Commercial Builder and Registered Designer in Australia.
