In this new episode of Not Just a Dentist, Dr. Robert Raimondi and Dr. Marc Sclafani sit inside the unfinished space that will become One Manhattan Dental’s new office. Before the walls and finishes hide the decisions behind the project, they explain why the move is happening and how the practice approached the design.
What does it really take to build a dental office from scratch in Manhattan?
The project began when a change in ownership at their existing building triggered a lease termination clause. Instead of simply recreating the current office somewhere else, the doctors used the move as an opportunity to reconsider the entire patient and clinical experience.
They discuss:
• Why One Manhattan Dental is moving
• Renovating an office versus building from scratch
• Finding a new location under a compressed timeline
• Choosing hospitality designers and dental specialists
• Why dental construction is technically complicated
• Designing patient flow before choosing finishes
• Rethinking reception, waiting, check-in, and checkout
• Protecting patient privacy
• Creating warm spaces without overdesigning them
• Standardizing treatment rooms for more consistent care
• Building an office that works better for the clinical team
• Lessons for other dentists and practice owners
This move gave us the opportunity to take what we have learned through decades of clinical practice and apply it to the physical environment. The new space is being built as a working clinical environment centered on comfort, privacy, efficiency, and the quality of care patients receive. The goal is an office that helps us deliver care more thoughtfully, protect privacy more consistently, support our team more effectively, and make the experience easier for patients from the moment they arrive.
Why is One Manhattan Dental moving?
A change in ownership at the practice’s current building activated a lease termination provision. The move created an opportunity to build a new office that better supports patient flow, privacy, technology, and clinical care.
Where will the new office be located?
The new office will remain in the same general area of Manhattan, only a few blocks from the current location. The practice will provide confirmed address and transition details directly to patients.
Are the doctors and team changing?
No. The move changes the physical office, not the doctors, team, clinical philosophy, or relationships patients have with the practice.
What will be different about the new office?
Patients can expect a more intentional arrival experience, greater privacy, warmer and less clinical surroundings, updated technology, and treatment rooms designed for consistency and smoother clinical care.
Will appointments be interrupted during the move?
Patients should continue following the location and appointment information provided by the One Manhattan Dental team. Specific transition instructions will be communicated before the move.
Why does the design of a dental office matter?
The layout affects privacy, noise, waiting, communication, clinical workflow, and how easily patients and team members move through an appointment. Good design does not replace good care, but it can remove unnecessary friction around that care.
Rob: Hello, Marc. Different setting today. We’re here at our new office. We’re in the process of building the new office.
Marc: Good morning. We’re here bright and early before our day at work. We’re sitting in the middle of construction for the new office, and we’re about two months into construction already.
Rob: So, where are we and why are we here? Our current office is in a building that was bought by a new owner. In New York City, this happens. The new owner is a developer who is converting the building from a mix of rental apartments and professional offices into condos. Some of those apartments are going to be the kind you see on the New York real estate shows. That’s great for the building, but not so great for us because it means we have to move.
We’re moving just a few blocks away, to 57th and Madison, and we wanted to talk about the journey. Maybe you’re a patient. Maybe you’re another dentist thinking about building an office. Or maybe you’re somebody who is going to experience an office as a patient, which all of us do. We wanted to talk about the decisions we’ve made and why.
Marc: A lot of patients ask us, “Why are you moving? Your office is beautiful. You just renovated it.” And they’re right. We renovated our existing office a couple of years ago. We changed the floors, wallpaper, dental chairs and finishes, but we were still stuck with the bones of the existing space and all of its limitations.
I’ve been practicing for about 30 years, and I’ve never really built my own office from scratch. I’ve renovated offices and moved into offices with other dentists, but this is our first opportunity to build an office together from a raw space.
I had been at 808, our current office, since 2010. Rob moved in with me in 2019, and we redesigned the office together, but we did not take down the walls. It was really a cosmetic facelift. This is different.
Rob: If you go back even further, the process really started when the building sold. The day it closed, we received an email telling us that a termination clause in our lease had been activated.
For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, our lease contained a clause that allowed the building to give us six months’ notice to leave. I remember exactly where I was when I got that email. I was on Long Beach Island, on my way out of the office, and suddenly this whole process started.
Before we even started looking at spaces, we were talking with lawyers about what to do and how to handle it. Luckily, one of our patients represented us, and we already had that trust. The reality was that six months is not enough time to find a dental space, design it, build it and move an office of our size.
So we had two processes happening at once. We were negotiating the terms of leaving our current office, and at the same time we were looking for a new space and negotiating a new lease.
Marc: And all of that was layered on top of a full work schedule and a full life. You don’t stop treating patients because you’re building an office. We had to interview real estate agents, look at spaces, talk to lawyers and then start figuring out who would actually help us build this thing.
Rob: Exactly. Once we started finding potential spaces, we were also interviewing designers, dental companies, manufacturers, distributors and IT companies. We had to decide whether the people we already worked with were the right people for this build or whether we needed new relationships.
Our current office has 17 treatment rooms. The new office will also have 17 treatment rooms, but we’re expanding the footprint to roughly 8,000 square feet. So you’re not talking about a small renovation. You’re basically talking about building an 8,000-square-foot home, except every room has specialized clinical infrastructure.
Marc: The first challenge was finding a space that was actually big enough and workable. That was a long process. Then we had to figure out the team. Neither of us came into this saying, “Okay, we know exactly which designer, engineer, contractor and architect we need.” We had to learn the process as we went.
One of the things we knew early was that we didn’t want to use only a traditional dental-office designer, because so many dental offices end up looking the same. We wanted something warmer and more hospitality-driven.
We chose a design team with commercial and hospitality experience. They understood from the beginning that we wanted the office to feel less clinical. Our current office is beautiful, but when we redesigned it, we made it white, crisp and clinical. In hindsight, it can feel a little sterile. For the new office, we wanted warmth.
Rob: At the same time, you can’t design a dental office only from the hospitality side. You need someone who understands exactly where the dental equipment, plumbing, air, suction and all the other technical pieces need to go.
So we had the hospitality design side balanced by people with deep dental-office experience. Then you add the architect, engineer, general contractor, IT company and dental-equipment team. All of those groups have to coordinate with each other.
Marc: We interviewed several general contractors, and we ultimately wanted the contractor with the most dental experience. There were plenty of contractors who wanted the job but had never built a dental office.
And a dental office is not a normal commercial build. We’re building 17 treatment rooms. That means waste lines, water lines, air, suction, electrical, data, computers, TVs and, in our case, nitrous and oxygen plumbed into the treatment rooms rather than portable tanks being wheeled around the office.
There is a huge amount of coordination, and if everyone isn’t on the same page, it affects the end result.
Rob: One thing people don’t think about is that a dental chair is sitting somewhere near the middle of a room, and all of those systems Marc just described have to reach that chair. A lot of that infrastructure runs through the floor and into the ceiling of the floor below you.
If you’re a dentist negotiating for a space, whether you’re in the suburbs or the city, you need to know what’s below you and how you’re going to plumb the office.
If there were a law office directly below us, for example, the contractors might have to go into that office at nights or on weekends, open the ceiling and do the plumbing from underneath. Think about how much time and coordination that adds.
We were fortunate. We originally considered the ninth floor, but the building gave us the opportunity to move to the tenth floor because the ninth floor below us was empty. That made the core drilling and plumbing much easier than if we had occupied the ninth floor with active tenants on the eighth floor below us.
So when you’re thinking about designing the space for your team and your patients, you’re also thinking about plumbing, electric, the floor below you and where every piece of equipment can physically go. It becomes a really interesting balance.
Marc: For us, the biggest issue in the current office is flow. When we renovated the existing office, we kept the bones of the space. We decorated around them.
Right now, when you open the door, you’re immediately in the waiting room. There may be patients sitting there, patients standing up, people checking in, people checking out and the front desk answering phones. Everybody is on top of each other.
The team is trying to move patients smoothly from one place to another while all of those things are happening in the same area.
Rob: That’s why we spent so much time on flow before we spent time on finishes. A lot of people think about designing a space the way they think about designing their home: floors, colors, textures, furniture. We spent months thinking about how humans move through the office.
Think about almost every doctor’s office you go into. You walk through the door and there’s a reception team right in front of you. They’re checking people in, checking people out and probably answering the phone at the same time.
Large hospital systems may move phone operations to a separate call center, but in most ordinary medical or dental offices, everything happens at that front desk. We wanted to change that.
Marc: We kept comparing it to checking into a good hotel. You walk in and someone is there to receive you. Maybe they offer you water, club soda or coffee. They help you understand where you’re going next. You’re not standing in the middle of a crowded front desk while somebody else is paying and another person is on the phone.
Rob: Or think about welcoming someone into your home. When a friend or family member comes over, you’re not opening the door while you’re on the phone and pointing them toward a chair. You open the door. You look at them. You receive them. You might ask if they want something to drink.
That’s the feeling we kept coming back to. One person at a time, we’re taking care of you. Come in and be part of our home and our family.
And honestly, it makes taking care of patients more enjoyable for the team too. When you create those moments and remove friction, everybody has a better experience.
Marc: Everybody is more relaxed when the office flows properly. There’s less anxiety between the staff and between patients.
The vision is that you walk into the new office, you’re greeted, and you don’t immediately feel like you’re in the middle of a dental clinic. The treatment rooms are farther away, so you’re not sitting in the waiting area listening to the sound of a drill.
We’re also trying to reduce the amount of unnecessary interaction between patients. In the current office, one patient may be walking in while another patient is standing at the desk trying to pay. Somebody in the waiting room can hear another patient discussing treatment, praising something or complaining about something. We want more privacy and less friction.
People don’t love going to the dentist. For the person who already doesn’t want to be there, the environment matters. We want them to feel welcomed, comfortable and less stressed.
The current office has 17 treatment rooms in a little under 5,000 square feet. The new office is close to 8,000 square feet and still has 17 treatment rooms. A lot of that additional space is going to the experience. The hallways are wider. The bathrooms are larger. The patient areas are larger. The lab is much bigger. The team has more room to work.
It should feel more concierge and less like a clinic.
Rob: Something else that’s important to us is that Marc and I own the practice. There isn’t a corporation or some other ownership group making the decisions. We’re partners, and that gives us autonomy over what the business feels like.
Healthcare has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Local hospitals have become massive systems. Dentistry has seen more private equity and DSO ownership. Now everyone is talking about how to put AI into the business, including AI answering the phones at nights and on weekends.
Technology can be useful. But there has also been a long-term dehumanization of the experience of being taken care of.
We’re sitting here in a raw physical space with wires hanging out of the ceiling, floor plans everywhere and IT people working around us. But the whole goal of the structure we’re building is to humanize the experience for every person who is part of this office.
We’ve even thought about the delivery people. How can somebody deliver packages without wandering around the practice asking where things go? There’s a package area near the elevator so deliveries can happen without disrupting the patient flow.
The physical environment affects how people perform and how people receive care.
Think about your own experience as a patient. We’ve all walked into offices where the person at reception is in a terrible mood. Now ask why. What does the environment allow the people working there to feel? Are they cramped? Are they constantly interrupted? Are they trying to do five things in the same place?
No matter how much technology gets added to healthcare, there is still a human relationship between the person receiving care and the person providing it.
Marc: That’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. Early in my career, I worked for dentists where I could potentially have taken over the office. I remember asking myself, “Do I want to work in this office with this old chair and this old waiting room?”
At the time, maybe it felt superficial because the care of the patient is the most important thing. But it always bothered me to work in a place I wasn’t proud of or didn’t think was comfortable.
I was proud of 808, our current office. But now that we’re building the new one, I can see the restrictions of 808 and the things we’ve been able to improve.
Rob: Marc and I probably agree on 95 percent of things and then 100 percent disagree on the other five percent, which makes designing something together interesting.
So, what about the finishes and textures?
Marc: Mostly organic and soft. Beiges, creams, warmer materials, some marble. The choices are more subtle. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the quality and quantity of light in the common areas.
We also added little things like water stations so patients can get water, club soda or coffee. The treatment rooms themselves will feel warmer than our existing rooms.
Lighting in a dental treatment room still has to work clinically. We need the right color temperature and the right light when we’re actually treating patients. But the room can still fit into the warmer design of the rest of the office.
We also made small functional changes. In the current office, some TVs are mounted where they become useless once the patient is reclined. In the new office, the screens are positioned so a patient can actually see them if they want to watch something or if we want to show them information.
Rob: One of my biggest pet peeves is an overdesigned healthcare office where the whole space seems built to showcase the front desk, the sign or the designer rather than the patient.
You can fall in love with your design style. Your office should reflect you to some degree, but you should fall in love with what your patients want, especially the patients who are the right fit for your practice.
The design, colors, flow and overall experience should be for them, not just an opportunity for the owner to show off what they like.
Marc: We looked at hospitality and healthcare spaces that did that really well. You can walk into a beautiful hotel or a well-designed medical space and feel the atmosphere without seeing one person’s personality screaming through every material choice.
That’s what we wanted. Warm, polished and intentional, but not a showroom.
Marc: The team is going to function much better in this office. We have a great team now and patients compliment them all the time, but there are restrictions in the current space. The front desk, consultation areas and clinical flow can all feel stacked on top of each other.
Rob: And that’s where standardization becomes really important.
Every hygiene room in the new office is going to be identical. Every clinical room will be as consistent as it can be for the type of treatment happening there.
The point is to protect attention. When you’re a healthcare professional, you’re already thinking about the patient, the diagnosis, the treatment, the sequence, the clinical details and sometimes the business side of discussing treatment. You don’t want to waste mental energy figuring out where the gloves are in this room or where someone put a material in another room.
So we’ve thought about where products go, where materials go, how sterilization flows and how the clinical team moves.
If you’re a hygienist working in a different room, the drawers should still be the same. Your muscle memory should know where everything is. If one hygienist has an opening and goes to help another hygienist restock a room, they shouldn’t have to relearn the room.
Marc: Right now you can go into one of our hygiene rooms looking for toothbrushes and open drawer after drawer trying to find them. In one room they’re here, in another room the floss is somewhere else.
That sounds like a tiny thing, but when you add those little frictions up across an entire day, they matter.
Marc: One of the biggest changes is our in-house lab.
A lot of patients don’t even realize we have an in-house lab now because it’s tucked away in the current office. In the new office, the lab is much more central. There are large glass windows, and it becomes something you can actually see.
We’re proud of it. We currently have three in-house technicians making a lot of our dentistry, and we’re looking to add more. We have talented ceramists making restorations right here as part of the practice.
Rob: We think about it almost like the open kitchen in a great restaurant. That’s where the product is being made. It’s part of the clinical process, and we’re proud of it, so why hide it in the corner?
Rob: What mistakes have we made so far? If another dentist were building a space, what would we tell them not to do?
Marc: I don’t think we’ll know every answer until we’re actually operating in the office. But one thing I would change is the sequence of some of the decisions.
We got pretty deep into design, colors, textures and materials before some of the engineering questions were completely finalized. We were having long meetings about materials while we still had questions about exact outlet locations and lighting infrastructure.
All of those decisions are necessary, but I think some of it happened out of sequence.
The engineering itself was also much more involved than I appreciated before we started. Every light, every outlet and every system has to be placed and coordinated, and then the city has to approve the plans. You can add months to the project just for approvals.
Rob: I would say another mistake was delay. We probably could have done a better job of assembling the core team faster and being decisive about the main partners, like the GC, design team and dental team.
When you’re first looking at spaces, it’s also incredibly helpful to have somebody who can do a rough fit test before you start negotiating seriously. We worked with an independent office designer, John Malone, who we’ve known for years. We could show him a potential space and ask, “Can the puzzle pieces actually fit?”
We found spaces that looked big enough on paper but didn’t work once you accounted for elevator placement, bathrooms, 17 operatories, the lab and the required flow.
Before you spend months negotiating a lease, make sure the space can physically become the office you need.
Marc: The same applies to contractors. We talked to people who had recently built offices and asked who they used and what went wrong. A few friends had contractors who left work unfinished or had them moving into offices that weren’t ready.
We took those experiences seriously. We narrowed the contractor list down and chose a team with substantial dental-office experience.
A bid can also be misleading if you’re not comparing the same scope. One contractor’s number may look lower because a sprinkler system or another major component isn’t included. You have to compare apples to apples.
Rob: If I could give one piece of advice to someone lucky enough to build an office, I’d say go a little further than you think you should. Build it a little bigger than you think you need, if you can. Lean into the experience you think your patients will love.
Think about future growth. Think about your team. Think about what the office will need years from now, not only what fits the practice today.
And talk to as many people as you can who have already been through the process. Ask who they used, what they liked, what they regret and what they would do differently.
Marc: You can see that it’s quiet in here right now because we asked the construction team to stop so we could film this. We’re going to let them get back to work in a minute.
But if you do the math, we’re roughly 100 days from when we have to move in.
Looking around right now, you can understand why that feels a little stressful.
Rob: We’re getting there on time. Change the language.
Marc: We’re crossing our fingers that all the permits and everything else fall into place because we don’t really have a choice. We need to be in by Halloween.
Rob: The last thing I want to talk about is the mindset around the move.
I’ve had so many patients tell me, “It’s terrible that you have to build a new office.” But when I received that email telling us we had to leave, I tried not to frame it that way.
I thought about the fact that I get to build a new office. There’s going to be a day in life when I would wish I had this problem and this opportunity.
You can say, “I have to build a new office,” or you can say, “I get to build this office.” Your self-talk matters.
Marc: I didn’t feel that way immediately. For the first week or two, I did feel like, “What are we doing?” I thought I was going to retire in the current office.
But it doesn’t bother me anymore. Now it’s exciting.
It probably helps that we didn’t have a choice. If the building had said we could stay and they would work around us, Rob and I might still be struggling with the decision: do we stay or do we go?
Sometimes being forced to make the change removes that debate.
And on the new lease, we were very careful with the lawyers. There is no demolition clause this time. We signed a 15-year lease, which should take me through at least the end of my career. I’m not sure if Rob will still be working after that. No one knows.
Rob: We’re going to do this again and show you more details as the office gets closer to completion. This is a huge part of our life right now.
I tell patients that I have a job and a hobby. My job is the clinical part of dentistry. This part, building and thinking about the practice, is also something I genuinely enjoy.
When you’re doing something this big with a partner, there is also a relationship component to it. You have your home life, your work life and then you throw a major construction project on top of both.
Marc: Get yourself a good coach. It helps.
Rob: It really does. We’ve worked with Mandy, who we originally met through Tony Robbins, for years. A great coach helps you organize your thoughts, work through the dynamics and see what you’re capable of doing.
It’s like working out by yourself versus working with a great personal trainer. If you have a truly great trainer, you’re probably going to get in better shape than if you do everything alone. The same can be true with a partner, your relationship with yourself and a project like this.
Marc: We’re excited to keep showing the progress.
Rob: Let us know what questions you have. If you’re going through this process or you’re lucky enough to be building an office, send us a message. Whatever we can do to help, we’re happy to share what we’ve learned.
Marc: Let’s do it.
Rob: We got it. It’s done.
