Upper East Side Townhouse

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST | Art Meets Design in a Sophisticated Upper East Side Townhouse

The duo behind Carlos David bring their youthful energy and fashion know-how to a kid-filled home.

Mexican architect Carlos Garciavelez and New York designer David Lawrence share a Lhasa Apso named Lolo, a background in luxury fashion, and a knack for creating unexpected and opulent spaces. And although they soft-launched their New York–based design firm, Carlos David, three years ago, the couple managed to keep most of their projects under wraps—that is until now.

“I think it’s really important to do the work first and then show people,” says Lawrence, who’s been creating high-end residential and commercial interiors for more than 15 years, following an early career in fashion merchandising with Giorgio Armani. It’s a sentiment shared by wunderkind architect Garciavelez, who was only 28 when he was invited to join the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, after receiving the prestigious Druker Fellowship and the Urban Planning and Design Thesis Prize from the university. He, too, boasts an impressive fashion résumé, including a stint at Alexander McQueen’s design studio in London and the launch of his own menswear label, which earned him GQ’s Emerging Designer of the Year prize in 2017.

The duo have been doing plenty of exploring of late, with a wildly diverse portfolio of projects, from an ultramodern glass pavilion in Barcelona to a classic art-filled Fifth Avenue piede-à-terre and a tailored Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. Most recently, they completed an extensive renovation and redesign of a six-floor, five-bedroom Upper East Side townhouse owned by notable art collector and philanthropist Nancy McCormick, a longtime Lawrence client who’s an American Ballet Theatre trustee and founder of the children’s clothing line Florence Fancy.