About Vine Roads

A tape measure, a cold thermos, a fence that faces south.

We are a small drawing studio in Long Is City. We spend our winters at the table, pencil down, learning one yard at a time.

Hands unrolling a scaled garden plan beside a tape measure, pencil and grape leaves

The short story

Concrete below. Sky above. A vine between.

A young grapevine trained along a brick wall above a short gravel path — One wall, six vines, a path to the gate.

Most of the yards we draw are small. A strip behind a rowhouse. A square of slab with one good wall. Places where people assumed a vineyard was something that happened somewhere else.

It isn’t. A vine wants sun, a post, and a little patience. The city offers all three if you know where to look.

So we look. We measure the fence, watch where the light lands at three o’clock, and press a trowel into the soil. Then we go back to the studio on Center Blvd and draw: rows, arbors, paths, each to scale.

We don’t build what we draw. We hand you the sheets, the planting layout and a material list with counts. You, a carpenter, or a patient weekend does the rest. The plan is ours. The first grape is yours.

What we keep on the wall

Draw slowly. Plant once. Wait well.

— the Vine Roads studio

How we work

Three habits we won’t trade.

Small studio habits, kept the same in a courtyard in July or a cold walk-through in December.

Pencil before ink
Every plan starts as a loose sketch you’re invited to argue with. The sheets are drawn only after you’ve moved a row, shrunk an arbor, or bent a path around the pear tree.
Count everything
Posts, wire, bags of gravel, flagstones by the square foot. The material list gives real counts, so a lumberyard quote can be checked against it line by line.
Choose for the winter
We pick vines for a Queens January, not a catalogue photograph. Cold-bred varieties, set where a wall holds the day’s warmth a little longer.

Before the walk-through

Pockets to fill before we arrive.

Nothing fancy. A few small things make the first hour count.

One

The length of the fence

Roughly will do. A phone photo of each wall, standing at the back door, tells us more than any adjective.

Two

Where the sun stands

Which wall is bright at noon, which at five. Even a guess helps; we’ll confirm it in the light.

Three

The grape you can taste

Jelly, juice, a bottle someday, or shade to sit under. What you want from the vine decides the variety.

Bring us the yard.

Book a walk-through See the sheets & prices

Studio hours: Mon–Thu 9:30am–7pm, Fri to 3pm · 4630 Center Blvd, Long Is City, NY 11109