Nina Garcia at Home in Manhattan

Nhas had to do quite a bit more than click her vertiginous Tom Ford heels to make herself feel at home. For years she was too busy juggling the roles of mother, fashion director of Marie Claire, and judge on the popular reality show Project Runway, now airing its tenth season, to focus on creating a stellar personal haven. But with help from the right designer, it finally came together.

After weeks of attending fashion shows in Paris or Milan, along with the affiliated cavalcade of dinners and parties, the New York City–based Garcia prefers to retreat into a private world where the volume is dialed all the way down. “When I come home, I need to feel instantly disconnected,” the native Colombian says. “In the rest of my life, I feel overstimulated. Here, I want things to be serene and unfussy, full of objects I love—but not too many of them.”

 Seven years ago she and her husband, David Conrod, a managing partner and cofounder of G2 Investment Group, purchased a three-bedroom apartment in a 1908 building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The space, once part of a larger flat, was a tangle of small rooms, but with work dominating their lives at the time, it was more than adequate. Then, in 2006, as real-estate fairy tales so often go, shortly before Garcia became pregnant with the couple’s first child, Lucas, the adjoining unit came on the market. (Another son, Alexander, followed in 2010.) That apartment was their residence’s missing half, and the pair pounced on it and started making plans.

Initially, the renovation and decoration of the now-four- bedroom abode proved to be “slow, expensive, hit or miss, sometimes a nightmare,” Garcia says. “It’s not like buying a dress. With furniture you have to proceed carefully.” On one of her Paris trips she spotted a set of Carl Malmsten klismos-style chairs that haunted her on the flight back to the States. A friend suggested she might find something similar at the SoHo decorative-arts gallery BAC, which is owned by Cuban-born designer Carlos Aparicio and known for fine midcentury works. “Amazingly, Carlos had the same chairs,” Garcia recalls. “And that started the whole conversation.”

The chat was fruitful, and a bond was formed. Aparicio soon took over the Garcia-Conrod project, which included restoring architectural details, as well as enlarging the living room so the couple could entertain more comfortably. Meanwhile, architect and client explored their shared affinity for French and Scandinavian furnishings of the 1930s and ’40s. “Back then there was a tight relationship between furniture designers and the fashion world,” Aparicio says. “Jean-Michel Frank, for example, created interiors for Schiaparelli, Lelong, and Guerlain. I think Nina liked the fact that many of the pieces had a link to her professional world.”