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.

A rental-friendly renovation meant a few clever paint jobs, hacking some furniture, and making plenty of use of Kiki’s polychrome creations. She and Vincent painted the walls with bold geometric patterns, giving shape to the open space around the living area. Wide yellow and white vertical stripes create a backdrop for the dining table; an orange rectangle with a green inset frames a shelf for a projector above the couch. Vincent once added legs to an out-of-production red Ikea bookshelf to avoid drilling big holes in the walls of their previous apartment, and it stands in the living room here. Along the wall with windows, plants spring from pots large and small, and knickknacks picked up on road trips upstate spread out across the space, which doubles as an improvised showroom for Kiki’s colorful design objects. Her metal-winged OO+II Wall Lights add shine throughout the home, and her Neo-Vanity Modular Mirror dangles beside the couch like a brooch; other works of hers pop up almost everywhere you look.

“We were looking for a raw space where we could create an environment that would fit our vision of a bright, joyful home.”
—Kiki Goti, designer and resident

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.”

“The whole apartment for us is kind of an experimental space where we can express ourselves, change our minds,” Vincent adds. “We know we’re not going to live here forever. New York is also kind of a transitional city in general, so while we’re here we want to be part of the craziness and creativity.”

“The exciting challenge was to completely transform the apartment with minimal permanent interventions.”
—Kiki Goti

“We’re really dreaming of having a place on an island in Greece, a small house or something like that,” Kiki says. “We say, ‘That would be great in our summer house in Greece.’ Then we say, ‘There’s no summer house.’ It’s all in our head.”

Have you taken on an ambitious Rental Revamp—or do you know someone who has? We want to hear about it! Reach out to edit@dwell.com with photos and a brief description.

Project Credits:

Interior Designer: Kiki Goti

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