"A Designer and Her Filmmaker Boyfriend Make Their Brooklyn Loft Feel Like a Showroom: Kiki Goti and Vincent Staropoli combine a few clever paint jobs with a sprinkling of Goti’s polychrome object designs to evoke a southern European feel that reflects the couple’s roots—and doesn’t break their lease agreement," Dwell, September 12, 2023.
Inside a row of converted factory buildings in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Kiki Goti and Vincent Staropoli’s vibrant apartment opens up to a bright living room with a wall of windows. Enough daylight streams into the modest space to create a New York loft version of indoor/outdoor Mediterranean living. Kiki, a designer from Thessaloníki, Greece, and Vincent, a Paris-born filmmaker whose family is Italian, wanted the look of their rental, with its high ceilings, white walls, and rough wooden floors, to reflect their Mediterranean backgrounds and feel influenced by the warmer climates of southern Europe—while staying within the limits of their lease.
Though the designer has long worked on larger projects like installations and buildings, she decided to try out smaller ones in the early pandemic lockdown. "I needed to find my own language," she says, "so I took a step back and started to do things with my own hands, to be more intuitive, find my voice and my aesthetic." While she has been operating out of a separate studio where she’s done the dirty work of painting or assembling shelves, mirrors, and more out of aluminum, upholstery foam, and other materials, she calls the loft a "testing ground" for her new designs. And now she’s moving her studio into the apartment. "It’s actually very useful for me to have people come over, because they see the things in a lived-in space, not a gallery setting," Kiki says. "They see the things in a home already."
