Functionality, spaciousness, and beauty: the guiding principles of Casa Marcelo, the start-up interior design business from Abigail Horace, echo the aesthetic values of Salisbury itself.

Her 2019 move from New York City to Salisbury was, in a some sense, a homecoming:

“The house that we grew up in had a backyard and we woke up to birds chirping and we had a community,” said Horace of her childhood home in Jamaica, Queens. “And that’s really what drew me up here. I felt like we do have more of a community here.”

Horace’s discovery of Salisbury was happenstance; a decade ago, her close college friend moved to Falls Village, where Horace visited her regularly, and fell in love with the area.

“Fast forward ten years,” said Horace, gesturing around Casa Marcelo’s warm, 19th century space: She and her husband moved to Falls Village in 2019 with a one-year-old; they are now raising two young sons in Salisbury.

After 10 years in high-end residential design in New York City, the move to the Northwest Corner was a welcome change for Horace. 

“I was exposed throughout my career to a lot of different kinds of luxury,” said Horace—she has designed for villas on Mustique (a private island in the Caribbean), penthouses with views of Central Park, lofts in TriBeCa and hedge funds in the Flatiron.

What Salisbury offers, she said, is the luxury of time and space: “[clients] are at peace and there’s no rush,” said Horace, commenting that even the contractors seem to have more time.

With the founding of Casa Marcelo, she’s been able to imbue her projects with that same spaciousness—working with the views up here, she said, is not unlike working with great art, in that the depth becomes a focal point of the space.

“I really try to give the space a chance to breathe,” she said. “It’s an additional layer of the design—to have a backyard that’s full of mountains.”

Part of letting the space breath, for Horace, is arranging it—both literally and metaphorically—around the life and personality of each client. She begins each project with an extensive questionnaire, which allows her to get a sense of how a potential client inhabits their space and their lives. It goes beyond the expected—beige, or colors? silver, or gold?—to ask how the client spends their leisure time, what their day-to-day routines consist of, where they love to travel, and what places they love the best. 

“I like figuring out who they are,” she said, particularly when their personal tastes and experiences differ from her own. “Those are the types of challenges that I like, because then I can really draw from my experience and design a space the client loves.”

There’s a challenge, said Horace, in creating a space that isn’t simply attractive, but feels deeply personal. (The logic is sound: No one actually wants to live in the chic little Parisian hotel featured in Arch Digest—all those exquisite grays are bound to become oppressive after a while.)

“I’ve walked into a lot of spaces that feel designed to the tee,” said Horace, comparing the effect to being in a museum. “It’s grounding to be  surrounded by things that you love and that remind you of who you are.” (Horace, who is half Dominican and half Panamanian, has a special regard for the way culture can be embedded in the texture of a home.)

Casa Marcelo is named for Horace’s family (Marcelo is her maiden name), and her design philosophy both honors and refutes her parents’ values.

“I think that my parents were extremely, extremely functional,” said Horace, and aesthetics were not a primary concern in her childhood home. In the formal living room, she said, the upholstered furniture was covered in plastic—including an exquisite chair which she saw uncovered for the first time this year (“I was like, wait, is this mohair?!”).

Now the mother of two young boys, Horace appreciates the practical functionality of her childhood home, she said, but she also believes that beauty is meant to be enjoyed, not to be preserved—practical, rather than precious.

“My mother had fantastic personal style,” said Horace. “That always inspired me, seeing the way that she put things together for herself. She was always fashionable—she had a really short bob, she wore a lot of pattern. She was just rocking it, all the time.”

Patterns and textiles are central to Horace’s approach: “The rug is the foundation of the room,” she said. Each space with the rug and the lighting: “Your eyes are just drawn up to the chandelier—it should be worth it […] Then I always have like a soft texture that everyone wants to sit on—something cozy.”

The space itself, she said, works best when it’s a frame for someone’s life. “Ideally, an interior is the backdrop of a lot of memories for a lot of people.”

Ultimately, it is Horace’s goal to create homes rooted in all of the aspects of a client’s life—their heritage, their routines, their social and interior lives, the things they love and the memories they cherish. A space like that “helps you to breathe better, or come into your day enthusiastically,” said Horace. “It can completely shift your mindset.”

Abigail Horace in her new design studio, Casa Marcelo. Photo by Maud Doyle