A Sense of Happy

Designer David Quarles IV knows self-care starts at home.

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Creating a great interior space takes listening and empathy, says designer David Quarles IV. “I think what really elevates a space is making sure that you go with the intention of the client, and not yours, and just really building out based on how they want to feel. How can we create their sense of calm, their sense of happy?”

Like any creative endeavor, interior design is always a tightrope walk between the artist’s creativity and the audience’s perception. Quarles says, in his case, the audience has to literally live with what he creates. “Yes, you have your signature, but you have to extract yourself from the design aesthetic, because you’re building out someone else’s home.”

Quarles designs more than interiors. He also paints, sculpts, designs jewelry, and teaches fitness classes. He says his multilevel creativity runs in the family, especially his father, David Quarles III. “I’m the fourth,” he says. “My dad, he is my artistic inspiration, period. My mom would always tell stories of when he used to work in his own father’s butcher shop. He would get butcher paper to draw on, and he would do these huge paintings and drawings and hang them up in the house. I think when I was around 4, they said that I started drawing.”

David Quarles III is also a musician and handy with a hammer. “Every weekend we would do some type of construction, or redoing a house for someone,” says his son. “So that’s where I got the inspiration early on of wanting to either go into architecture or go into design. And my grandmother as well: She would redo her home every season. And so going over to her house, seeing that, and being exposed to it early, that’s how I knew design was going to be my thing. I just needed to find my way to it.”

“My clients were coming to me, saying self-care definitely starts at home. The way that your home looks has a lot to do with your feelings, especially when you’re going out into the world. Because everything’s so chaotic right now, you need your own safe space. You need your own sanctuary, to recharge the positivity.” — David Quarles

Quarles graduated from the University of Memphis in 2011, and in a few years had become the merchandise marketing liaison for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. On his lunch hours, he would pop over to a little studio he kept Downtown to work on his jewelry designs. He says he liked working at St. Jude but eventually came to realize that office life was not for him. “I knew that I hadn’t given myself a chance yet,” he says. “I didn’t give my craft a chance.”

He left the security of St. Jude and moved his jewelry studio back into his home to save money. “I promise you, I was scared when I first left,” he recalls.

Quarles helped build out the interiors program at Downtown boutique Stock & Belle, and was selling his jewelry designs at craft fairs and Memphis Modern Market. Meanwhile, he started building a following on Instagram when he expanded his account from being purely fitness-oriented to highlighting his design acumen. He was thankful he had already made that transition when the pandemic upended life for everyone.

“The Memphis Modern Market,” he says, “we were doing shows every weekend at places like Loflin Yard and Railgarten. Emily [Dunn], who runs it, had the bright idea to just take it virtual. And so, through our Instagram stories, we would sell what we make.”

As exterior distractions shut down and the world migrated online, Quarles started to see a surge in interest in home design. “My clients were coming to me, saying self-care definitely starts at home,” he says. “The way that your home looks has a lot to do with your feelings, especially when you’re going out into the world. Because everything’s so chaotic right now, you need your own safe space. You need your own sanctuary, to recharge the positivity. So people wanted their house to look good again.”

But fear of spreading the virus meant he couldn’t engage with his client’s spaces in the same way as before. So the designer added a new tool to his box: Zoom. The first clients he had in the pandemic era helped him learn a new way of doing business. “I said, ‘Let’s do this virtually,’” he recalls. Instead of touring the home with the client, “they took their iPad around and said, ‘This is what we want to change, and this is our style.’ We did a full virtual consultation. I’ve redone my entire website to build out virtual design services.”

“That’s why it’s so important to me, when creating for clients, to ask, ‘What do you like? We’ll find a way to incorporate it, and if we can’t, then we’ll find something like it, so the aesthetic is still pleasing to the desire that you had in the first place. It should speak to your personality.’” — David Quarles

Quarles says he felt the need to create a comfortable space in his own East Memphis home. For him, good design involves all of the senses. “Two of my favorite artists are Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo,” he says, “because of their way of expressing life, and how involved they were in their artistic expression — how much it was a part of them. I love the surrealism, and I love the use of color. I’m a synesthete. I basically hear color and see sound.

“So through music, I get a lot of inspiration for colors,” he continues. “That’s why I ask my clients, what is their favorite song, or what is a song that they imagine themselves listening to in a space, and see how they respond, to hear what kind of mood they want. I’ll use the song as a color palette, and then see if it translates into what they were envisioning for the space.”

The interior of the modest home is vibrant and relaxing. The spaces are filled with color from rugs to ceiling, but the rooms never feel busy or overwhelming. Quarles believes a space should reflect the people who live there, and his own home is no different.

“My dad’s side is Creole, Dominican, and Gullah,” he says. “Then my mom is indigenous American, white, and black. Some of her family comes from Mississippi, and some from out West.”

The varied color palette he created for his own dwelling “goes back to me asking my grandmother, ‘What color are we?’ Because, of course, being in Memphis and being in the South, it was very different in my family — so many different shades. She said, ‘Well, we’re all of them!’ That stuck with me and kind of shaped my personality. I know that I appreciate so much from so many people, but for my background, it’s colorful, and I’ve always loved all the colors.”

With so many shades competing for attention, Quarles says it’s important to keep the home’s furniture design spare and simple. “I really love the clean lines and the daring design of Mid-Century Modern,” he says. “I like to use it as a jumping-off point. I’ll infuse the worldly vibe with something that might reflect African motifs, or a particular fabric I use. Then I’ll layer it again with color. It’s using a base, kind of like a recipe, and then putting your personality into it with the different spices, the colors, the textures, and that’s how I like to create my home. I want it to really reflect who I am. But for a good foundation, clean lines is one thing that will unify everything.”

“I needed a full-sized rug, because, of course, rugs are used to frame the space that you’re trying to create,” says Quarles. “I loved those conversation pits from the sixties and seventies. My whole house has been redone, basically during the pandemic last year. I wanted to create a space for when my friends do come over that was reminiscent of those conversation pits.”

Of course, actually tearing out the floor and creating a sunken space would be wildly impractical, so Quarles chose an austere sectional couch which wraps around two walls of the room to stimulate social interaction.

Quarles, a frequent entertainer before the pandemic, used his time at home as an opportunity to redo his troublesome outdoor space. Before, he says, it was a morass of mud and moss. Now, it features distinctive social spaces united by an easy flow. “I wanted to create the ultimate outdoor apartment,” he says. “And that’s how I figured out the layout of this space.”

Underneath a wide shade tree, a deck, which Quarles built with his father, provides another version of a conversation pit, with simple, rattan furniture surrounding a pair of circular cocktail tables. They filled in the formerly muddy space with rocks, and added a long table with six chairs for outdoor dining. In one corner is a bar, and in the facing corner, an egg chair hangs in dappled sunlight.

“I just wanted to create my own oasis,” Quarles says. “I love having outside space, and I spend so much time outside. So that’s why I created this reading nook — except it should be called the ‘napping nook’, because every time I get out there with a book, that chair is so comfortable.”

Back inside, the dining room is the designer’s favorite space in the house. “I definitely wanted this to be a vibrant conversation of warm and cool colors,” he says. “I think a lot of people say the kitchen is the heart of the home, but for me, it’s the dining room. That’s where you converse with friends. It’s where you break bread. It’s where you tell stories, whether they’re good or bad. And there’s usually a lot of laughter when food is involved. That’s why I put so much thought and intention into creating this space, because I want it to feel like that. Even if it’s new friends you’re welcoming, you’re going to have something to talk about in this room.”

One wall of the dining room has a lot of stories to tell. It’s dominated by a painting that, unlike most of the art in the house, is not by a Memphis artist. “It’s from the Dominican Republic. I was trying to get a little bit more into my Caribbean roots,” he says. “I don’t know the artist, because I bought it on the beach. Then, I almost lost it in the Atlanta airport! Someone came running after me and said, ‘Hey! You left that big old painting!’”

Behind the art is a hand-painted mural wall that resembles a jungle print. Quarles was going to cover the area with wallpaper, but he didn’t have enough to cover the whole space. So he took leftover Behr paint samples and started trying to create something memorable. Then, his father was unexpectedly hospitalized.

“He’s a picture of health, so I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. “I went to the hospital to stay with him for a while. The doctors had a clear handle on it, but I didn’t have a handle on it, because it was such a shock to me. So I asked question after question after question to that poor medical staff. I still feel indebted to them! Eventually, they told me it was time to go home.”

To distract himself from worry, he put on some music and finished painting the wall. “It helped to have a clear plan,” he says. “And that’s just life in general. I always say that you have so many life lessons in home improvement. If you have a clear plan, no matter what happens, you can always get back to bringing it to fruition.” Thankfully, his father is doing well now.

Befitting someone who works in so many different creative media, inspiration is always at hand. From the prisms set up to refract the rays of the setting sun into room-filling rainbows, to the colored pencils and pad next to his bed so he can jot down design ideas that come in dreams, this is the home of a true artist. He lives by the most important bit of advice he gives his clients: Make it your own.

“In the design industry, the trend now is filling your home with the things that you love, not with what a designer necessarily tells you that you should put in your home,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important to me, when creating for clients, to ask, ‘What do you like? We’ll find a way to incorporate it, and if we can’t, then we’ll find something like it, so the aesthetic is still pleasing to the desire that you had in the first place. It should speak to your personality.’”