David Quarles IV quickly touches the tip of his nose, sometimes three or four times — often mid-sentence — to orient the ideas swirling in his brain.

He’s been doing it since second grade on the practical and tactical advice of his teacher, who could almost see the castles he was building in the sky and wanted to help him learn to center.

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“She knew I was very much an in-the-clouds thinker,” Quarles says, his upturned mustache broadening what appears to be a ceaseless smile.

Quarles, 33, may still be a daydreamer, but his practical side has found a way to build a foundation beneath the unicorn mist to market his vibe on what suddenly seems like a large stage.

All week, he was in New York, setting up the master bedroom he designed for Real Simple magazine’s home issue in October, a first for him.

Just before that, on July 5, Architectural Digest named Quarles one of eight “emerging design stars from across the country,” with a short profile and portrait taken in his home on Marcia Road off Sea Isle Road.

It’s such an everyday Memphis neighborhood, no one expects to see the grandeur he’s brought to the 1,440-square-foot midcentury modern ranch and its corner lot.

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Much of the flair — at least the kind that can be purchased: furnishings, rugs and fixtures — is donated by vendors willing to give Quarles plenty in order to appear in his design posts. He has 4.8 million friends on Facebook and 75,000 on Instagram.

His followers get his DIY videos — delivered with Quarles’ sunny outlook — for solving niggling design and storage problems and making it look easy enough to do that they can imagine themselves doing it.

The videos include links for the products and a tracking mechanism so vendors can track the sales. Quarles gets a commission on them.

Lowe’s, the first to give Quarles a contract, sponsored a year’s worth of building supplies and furnishings. Quarles added a greenhouse, turned the carport into a home gym and added improvements that include the pink-terrazzo tile entryway at the front door framed by dark paneling and a smattering of hand-picked accessories that, in his Instagram posts, instantly are imbued with the Quarles’ mystique.

His design reflects his heritage, African American, African Caribbean and Irish. To honor his lineage, he uses bright palettes and rich textures, layering them, and in the case of his living room, picking up hints of color from one place to another in a pillow or a plant so that the pieces, silent on the surface, “are talking to each other,” he says.

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“Our homes are our safe spaces, where we can recharge,” he explains. “When you wake up in a room I’ve designed, I want you to feel like, ‘I’m going to be OK today.’”

Quarles has also designed for Apartment Therapy, Home Goods and Arhaus. He’s done video shoots for Ford Motor Co., Target, Walmart and a half-dozen others. And now, he’s doing product placement shoots in his home for brands that include V8, Arhaus, Jack Daniel, Absolut and Samsung.

“They want their product photographed in a beautiful place. And since I’m a designer, I can definitely create pretty vignettes.”

He has his own line of wallpaper, each design named for a family matriarch, sold through Chasing Paper in Milwaukee. And until about a month ago, he’d taught Zumba classes in Memphis for 13 years. 

He left to attend to his fast-growing business, in which he designs from the music that clients say sums up how they want the new space to feel.

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“All of us have that one song we can picture as our space,” Quarles says. “I think we all create musical montages in our head of what our perfect home looks like. I ask clients, ‘What song is playing in the background?’ I want to pull the colors and the textures, even the fabrics that make it come to life.”

His song? “It’s My House” by Diana Ross.

Quarles lives barefoot at home, and guests find themselves walking on smoothly clean hardwood floors through the 1950s-era house that is his showroom, workspace and the journal of where he’s been stylistically. And it can change as new design issues present themselves.

He graduated from Overton High in 2007 and, later, from the University of Memphis.

Ultimately, Quarles wants his own national TV show focused on design and interior problem-solving. In the process of living that production dream, and frankly just being himself, he started creating videos of his home projects during the pandemic, mostly, he says, to amuse himself.

He posted them, including the tropics-inspired motif he painted on a dining room wall when the wallpaper he ordered arrived several rolls short.

Because Quarles had a photoshoot already scheduled for a local design magazine, there wasn’t time to wait for missing rolls.

In the meantime, his father was hospitalized, and Quarles stopped everything to be there. When he got the all-clear days later to get back to work, he had two days to paint the wall in the flora theme and experiment with lighting to create sunshine streaming through the window in a gray Memphis week.

“That wall is my permanent reminder that whatever you are going through, it’s going to be alright,” Quarles says.

It really has been. Real Simple editors saw the video he posted and called to interview him for a story on the magazine’s website in 2021.

It’s been a blur since for Studio 417, his interior design firm.

Quarles was the only designer Kelly English even considered for the Pantà, the remake of Iris on Monroe Avenue off Overton Square. Pantà opened Oct. 30, 2021.

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“I would not try to box him in with words. That dude is love,” English says.

Quarles is so comfortable in his own skin that his nighttime personal care video shows him carefully tucking his glasses into a bureau drawer with at least four other pair, then exiting his bedroom in silk pajamas to wash his face in a bathroom sink with golden fixtures, all the while winking to the camera.

English gave him little direction, except that he was designing for a Catalan-themed restaurant that English wanted to be a standout.

“When you’re dealing with creative people, you have a choice to make. You can tell them where you want to end up and let them get there the way they do, or you can micromanage the path and not know where you’re going to get,” English says.

“And so, with very minimal input, the interior of the restaurant is completely David.”

It’s a study in layers of texture, warm colors and whimsy, including the dragon etched in glass on the front door and a glass-tiled Corinthian column near the entry. 

“In my mind, I just thought it was just going to be three colors of tile,” said James Daniels, the contractor at The Pros Contracting who often works with Quarles. “He said, ‘No, I want to take pieces out, and we’re going to randomly put them in place.’

“I thought, ‘What?’ But once we did it, I just loved it,” Daniels said. “Because it’s not your typical tiled column. “… David put pieces in. I put pieces in. Kelly even put in a couple of pieces.”

Generally, they work side by side.

“David gives out the general idea of the vision, the feel of it. We just bounce back and forth until we see the same space,” Daniels said.

Projects with Quarles tend to be universally different, he says, noting that for him, a bathroom used to be essentially a white room with a bold-color towel.

“David will put multiple layers on top of each other, and it works. It’s crazy.”

Pantà alone kicked Quarles’ career years forward.

Studio 417 is booked through March 2024, including a large residential project in New Orleans.

The designer that started out in small spaces — powder rooms and tiny apartments — no longer does just small.

“We do homes because of Pantà,” Quarles said. “It’s the biggest platform for seeing my work. It ended up changing my trajectory as an interior designer.”

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