Two of a Kind

“Every room is an installation,” says Alessandra Mondolfi, as she touches an antique steel surgical lamp in the purple kitchen of the rambling 19th-century Roxbury home she shares with her husband and business partner, Tyler Evans. She’s surrounded by bold, eclectic furnishings and décor—oversized specimen tubes sit atop the refrigerator, a shiny steel island gleams in the room’s center, a disquieting zipper of small animal skulls lines a wall near the door. Conventional? Not at all. Fascinating? Absolutely.

Welcome to the work of TEAMcreative, the interior, landscape, furniture, and fine art design business Mondolfi and Evans, award-winning graduates of Mass Art, have run for 14 years (the moniker comes from the couple’s initials). Mondolfi is the firm’s lead player and regularly designs window displays and custom fixtures for high-end retail stores like the South End’s Michele Mercaldo and Puma’s Black Station Stores in New York and Tokyo. “My career path? Not so linear,” she admits. After spending a year in Barcelona on a Fulbright grant, the woman who once produced large-scale art installations worked as a furniture designer, photographer, and technical instructor for the MIT Visual Arts Program. During the day, Evans is the head of special operations at Independent Fabrication, a Union Square custom bicycle manufacturing facility. On nights and weekends, he’s collaborating with Mondolfi.

TEAMcreative is both a professional enterprise and the state of the couple’s union. Case in point: the aforementioned kitchen and the rest of the thirty-something pair’s first-floor apartment. (They bought the wood-framed, three-story house eight years ago and rent out the other three units.) They lavished their home with prodigious creative energy, rendering a series of gracefully appointed, mysterious rooms that complement the structure’s original architectural character. From an undulating green painting in the foyer to bright round floral paintings and the circular, snap-together handmade “Supercouch,” as they lovingly refer to it, in the living room, to the monkey figurine shrine on the mantel in the bedroom, this couple has etched themselves into every nook and cranny.

In a neighborhood burdened by protracted city-led development, Mondolfi and Evans transformed their dirt patch of a yard into a handsome landscape that won first place honors in the 2005 Mayor’s Garden Contest. Now, rooftop gardens and urban greenscapes designed by Mondolfi are scattered throughout properties across Beacon Hill, the South End, and the Back Bay.

Mondolfi and Evans will tackle just about any project. “We’ve been partners from the first day we met in 1994,” Evans says. He shares their wedding photos, taken at the tattoo parlor in Trinidad where they exchanged vows four years ago. To celebrate, the couple designed an abstraction of their initials which they had tattooed around their wrists. When held together, the tattoos complete a replica of the TEAMcreative logo. “Our mission? To make a living using our creativity,” Mondolfi says. With a smile, she adds, “sometimes I think Tyler and I can make anything.”