This Design Duo’s Lisbon Apartment Is A Study In Ceramics

French duo Olivier Garcé and Clio Dimofski took a circuitous route to Lisbon, Portugal, where their 2,300-square-foot apartment doubles as a gallery for their eponymous multidisciplinary practice. The couple met studying design at Paris’s École Carmondo, completed second degrees at the École d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette, and then decamped to Beijing for a year. “It was just after the Olympics,” Garcé reports, “and we got to experience the impact of two cultures on contemporary design and architecture.” Back in Paris, individual stints at firms like Shigeru Ban Architects and Hamonic + Masson & Associés preceded a move to New York to launch an office for Pierre Yovanovitch Architecture d’Interieur, before returning to Europe in 2021—daughter Zoë and dog LeWitt in tow—to open a studio of their own.

Lisbon beckoned for a number of reasons. “My mother’s Portuguese,” Garcé says, “so there was already a close connection.” More importantly, the couple wanted their practice to involve local craftspeople, something they felt would be easier to achieve in Portugal where, Dimofski notes, “There’s so much to discover and develop.” The apartment-gallery is on the second floor of a late 19th–century Pombaline-style building featuring solid-color exterior tilework rather than the ornate azulejos of earlier periods. The interior, however, doesn’t lack for elaborate plasterwork and moldings, which the couple carefully preserved when renovating the run-down property, “to keep the soul of the space,” as Dimofski puts it. Outfitted with a mix of new and vintage pieces, contemporary art, and the designers’ own distinctive handcrafted furniture and products, the light-filled quarters reflect their ethos and aesthetic perfectly.