Carmen De Lavallade’s Upper West Side Home

Geoffrey Holder never lived in the Upper West Side prewar apartment that his wife, the dancer, actor and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, has occupied since 2011.

Failing health kept him at an actors’ residence, then a hospital for the three years before his death in October. Even so, his presence is keenly felt all through the two-bedroom space.

“That’s Geoffrey’s.” “Geoffrey did that.” “Those are Geoffrey’s.” Such are the responses you’ll get when you ask the gracile Ms. de Lavallade, 83, about any piece of art in the apartment — the arresting mixed media figure of a woman that hangs over the fireplace; the abstract sculpture made with paper cups on the mantelpiece; the crucifix fashioned from a corrugated box, tape and ribbon cord; the wire hanger bent into the shape of two figures representing Mr. Holder and Ms. de Lavallade; the regal fellow created from cardboard and a hanger with a parade of plastic forks serving as his crown.

They are among the 100 or so works that Mr. Holder, the dancer, choreographer, singer, Tony-winning director and costume designer, James Bond baddie and 7Up pitchman, completed during his extended stay at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., and in a New York hospital. Canvases are stacked against a wall in the living room and stored in one of the bedrooms. They’re tucked behind two Japanese screens that he painted, at his wife’s request, to look like gardens.

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“Whatever material was around, Geoffrey used. He just kept going,” said Ms. de Lavallade, who will perform her one-woman dance/theater piece “As I Remember It” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through Feb. 25 and who also appears in the free iPhone App “Dancing Sondheim.”

“Geoffrey doesn’t see things for how they are,” continued Ms. de Lavallade, who often slips into the present tense when talking about her late husband. “If something is a ribbon cord, to Geoffrey it doesn’t have to be a cord. He changed the way I look at things. He helped me have a vision.” The two met in 1954 when they were cast in the Broadway musical “House of Flowers” and married the following year.

“My hope was that we would live here together, but things didn’t turn out that way,” she said ruefully, gazing around the living room.

“It’s very strange, I must admit, but when Geoffrey left, something went out of the paintings. It’s like they sighed. They still have a vibrancy, but I think when artists leave, something in their work leaves, too.”

Until the move to the Upper West Side, the couple lived on Broadway and Prince in a 5,000-square-foot loft crammed with works and works in progress by Mr. Holder, who in 1957 won a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting. “We came there in 1981, and at the time it was great,” she recalled. “And then it became much too commercial. And people were always sitting on the doorstep. If you told them to move they’d get very angry and kind of give you the evil eye.”

After Mr. Holder fell and broke his hip, a mishap that led to other health problems and to his subsequent decline, “the logistics just became too difficult to stay in the loft,” Ms. de Lavallade said.

The Upper West Side made sense as a place to hang her hat. It was quiet and it was familiar. The couple had rented two floors of a brownstone on 88th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus in the early years of their marriage. 

This time around, “I saw lots of places that were like beehives and that had the kitchen in the front and I just thought ‘Oh, no,’ ” said Ms. Lavallade, who chose her apartment for what she calls its personality. By this she means the French doors between the living room and dining room, high beamed ceilings, the herringbone floors and the fireplace. “It’s of its time and I like things like that,” she said. Mostly, though, she loved the six-over-six double-hung windows, the views facing south and east, and the sunlight.

“I think the light is its own kind of decoration,” Ms. de Lavallade said. “During the year, it keeps changing and that’s what I like about it. It’s a show I can sit and watch. I love looking out at the rooftops. And then the sun sets, the windows reflect the light back in here. And then I watch the moon. I’m moon crazy. When I moved in and first saw the moon rise, I couldn’t believe it. It was really exquisite, so I wrote a poem about it.”

Ms. de Lavallade had intended for the apartment to reflect her design aesthetic: Less is more. “I can live Japanese style, but Geoffrey liked a lot of stuff around,” she said. “If there was a space in the loft he would fill it with something and I’d try to get rid of it. That was our silent battle.”

Then she added, “He won.”

It seems that he’s still winning. “I was trying to keep things as bare as possible here, but when he left the Actors Home, we had to get all his paintings and sculptures out of there, so they had to come here. But,” she added hastily, “they are wonderful things.”

Still, Ms. de Lavallade has tried to put her own stamp on the place. A pair of sand-color armchairs that belonged to one of her grandmothers bring back happy childhood memories. “I remember my grandmother sitting in one chair and my Auntie Angelique in the other,” she said.

The two Spanish Baroque chairs at the dining room table conjure equally warm recollections. “When my husband and I were first married, we lived on Third Avenue in a funny little loft by the El train. There was a Spanish guy who lived above us and when he went back home, he offered the chairs to me and I took them. I didn’t argue. They are beautiful, really beautiful.” Later in her career, she used one of the chairs in a dance.

Nearby is her mother’s old dining room table, the mechanism to expand it broken long ago. Now it’s an elegant sideboard that holds a filigreed mirror and a photograph of Ms. de Lavallade, Mr. Holder and their son, Léo, out on the town. There’s another photo of Mr. Holder in the entryway, the contemplative, considering image that was on display at his funeral. Right under it, on a small square pedestal table, an electric candle flickers.