Intelligencer - A Craftsman’s Home in Prospect Heights

The first time Kiera Coffee walked into her Prospect Heights apartment 27 years ago, accompanied by a real-estate agent, “every single room was Pepto Bismol pink,” she says. “The bathroom had been retiled in pink, there was a pink shower and pink kitchen counters, and I was told that the former tenant lived without a stove because it couldn’t be pink.” But the landlady repainted the apartment, and Coffee moved in. Over the following decades, Coffee — an author, prop stylist, and set designer — would fill nearly every surface with a constantly rotating assemblage of crafts. Some of these she created for work, like a mobile she once brought home from a set; others she designed on a whim, like a vessel she made out of an old seltzer bottle. “Most of my apartment changes constantly,” she says. “It gets messy, but messy can be really fruitful.”