The first project on which architect Carlos Garciavelles and interior designer David Lawrence collaborated was the gut renovation of a friend’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “There was some hesitation because we are also a couple,” Lawrence says, but it soon became apparent that their sum of talents was greater than they could achieve separately. “Carlos is a creative coach and I’m an editor. Carlos has 20,000 ideas, and I’m like, ‘Slow down your turn!’ In other words, they’re the perfect creative chips.
The partners, who together run design studio Carlos David, agree that the epitome of their collaboration and their new calling card is the Upper West Side apartment they share.
The result is an incubator of long-standing ideas that reflect their interdisciplinary backgrounds, as well as a home for their collection of mid-century French, American and Italian design, vintage fashion, and eclectic artwork by friends and colleagues whose careers have ramped up alongside their own. (Lulu Lhasa Apsu is the third inhabitant.)
About five years ago, Lawrence and Garciavelles fell in love with a classic antebellum apartment, one block from Central Park. She seduced them with original details, from high ceilings and herringbone wood floors to plaster walls, cave moldings, and northern, eastern and western exposures. They completed a “modified” gut renovation and renovation about two years ago and had just begun demolishing the master bath when the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to halt construction.
After the hiatus, they resumed the project, using the fear and inertia they experienced during the pandemic as inspiration to “perfect our world,” says Lawrence. Work began in the living room, a space that received ample daylight from a large window; Less about decoration and more about organization, it now displays valuable pieces of art and furniture they have acquired over the years.
There are two antique black leather Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, gifts from Garciavelez’s father when Garciavelez graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They also had a vintage Edward Wormley sofa set on a re-upholstered woven linen plinth. It sits beneath a huge photo of an abandoned modernist building in Argentina that Garciavelles took during a fellowship in South America.
After working as an architect in his native Mexico and New York, Garciavelez left the practice for periods in fashion, eventually starting his own menswear brand. He returned to architecture but did not leave fashion behind. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of the talent hidden in the New York City clothing district, he and Lawrence work to develop a range of custom furnishings and fabrics. The designers’ TV room, for example, is a red and gold cocoon dipped in silk taffeta and gold leaf wallcoverings designed by Garciavelles modeled on Roberto Burle Marx’s iconic tiles for his Rio de Janeiro studio.
Similarly, the designers created an immersive dining nook in the kitchen by covering a wall and a custom-made banquette in the same fabric as Thevenon, which houses parrots amid a tangled forest. Entering their elegant charcoal-filled bedroom is like walking into a well-tailored suit, with a cashmere-and-wool stripe from Ralph Lauren Home adorning the walls.
Elsewhere, re-upholstered artifacts continue to mix with bold pattern or unexpected details to create separate transitions, such as the marble-lined door frame separating the apartment entrance from the living room.
“There is a lot of consensus that happened here that helped us respect each other,” Garciavelles says. “You choose your battles. The result is richer than you thought.”
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of ELLE DECOR. Participate
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