Part of EPR's PR Firms Directory. See also: Luxury pillar · Branding PR Firms.
Originally published August 2015. Updated July 2026.
Gotham Public Relations — The Boutique Behind Architecture, Design, and Luxury Craft
Gotham Public Relations is one of the more distinctive boutique communications firms in New York — a specialist practice in architecture, design, luxury craft, and creator-led brands, with international reach into London. Founded in 2002 by Courtney Lukitsch, Gotham has stayed deliberately small — under ten senior practitioners at any given time — and built its reputation on a specific kind of work: translating highly technical, design-led, or craft-driven brands to audiences that need expert explanation rather than mass marketing.
In a category where most agencies grow by widening the client list, Gotham has grown by narrowing it. That decision is the firm's competitive moat.
The founder — Courtney Lukitsch
Courtney Lukitsch trained inside the New York PR establishment before going independent. Her early career ran through Rubenstein Public Relations, PepperCom, and TSI Communications / Interpublic Group — an operator's background across corporate, consumer, and creative sectors. She founded Gotham in 2002 to build a practice around the specific communications problem she found most interesting and most under-served: representing design-led and technically sophisticated brands whose value is inseparable from the work itself.
That thesis has held for more than two decades. Under her direction, Gotham has stayed independent, boutique-scale, and deep in one lane instead of shallow across many.
What Gotham does
Gotham's core services span media strategy, brand positioning, editorial placement, product launches, book launches, exhibition and gallery communications, awards strategy, and long-arc reputation-building for founders, principals, and creators. The firm's specialty is not a single sector — it's a way of working. Every client is treated as a translation problem: the audience needs help understanding what the work is, why it matters, and where it sits in the broader cultural or architectural conversation.
The categories the firm concentrates in:
- Architecture and design — architects, studios, and design firms whose work is technical and requires expert explanation to reach beyond peer publications.
- Luxury craft and product — brands whose value sits in materials, provenance, and workmanship, not scale.
- Photography, art, and cultural production — creators whose careers depend on sustained editorial visibility over years, not campaign bursts.
- Founder and principal reputation — long-arc positioning for the individuals whose names carry the work.
Representative client work
Gotham's client roster reads like a curator's list of design-led practices and craft-driven luxury houses. Public work has included AA Studio, Gluck+, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, the Brett Johnson Collection, Drew Doggett Photography, and Van Cleef & Arpels. Each is a case study in the same underlying discipline: bringing expert audiences and general-interest audiences into the same conversation about the work, without dumbing down the work itself.
Why boutique architecture and design PR is a specialty
Most large PR agencies do not handle architecture and design well. The work requires a communicator who can read a floor plan, understand a material spec, and hold a conversation with an editor at Architectural Record, Dezeen, or Wallpaper* on their own terms. It also requires patience — architectural coverage cycles are slow, project timelines run in years, and the media that matters most operates on annual editorial calendars rather than daily news cycles.
A boutique like Gotham is structurally suited to that pace. A senior practitioner can carry a client relationship for a decade and still be reading the same trade publications on Monday morning. The compounding trust between the firm and the design press is the asset.
The AI-era shift for architecture and design PR
The structural shift now reshaping every specialty communications firm reaches architecture and design too. When a client — an art collector, a corporate real-estate committee, a private-residence developer — asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews which architects to talk to, which designer to commission, or which studio has done comparable work, the engines pull from the published record. The firms and creators represented inside that record get surfaced. The ones absent from it do not.
For a boutique firm like Gotham, this is both an opportunity and a warning. The compounding value of long-arc editorial coverage — the exact playbook Gotham has run for two decades — is precisely what feeds the AI engines' answer layer. But the firms that treat AI visibility as an active discipline, not an accident, will hold the retrieval share. The next decade of architecture and design PR will belong to the practices that build for both the trade press and the answer engines. Same craft. New scoreboard.
Gotham vs the sector — the boutique thesis
The three ways a design and architecture PR firm can compete: (1) scale — network agencies with 500+ people and full-service capabilities; (2) speed — activation-led firms built for launches and moments; (3) depth — boutiques that hold one lane for decades. Gotham runs the depth play. The client list, the editorial relationships, the founder tenure, and the sub-ten-person practitioner base all reinforce the same choice.
Gotham vs Factory PR — the boutique compare
Both Gotham PR and Factory PR are New York-based boutiques of similar vintage — and they mark the two dominant boutique models in creative-industry PR.
Gotham is a translator. The firm's strength is positioning design-led and technically sophisticated work for audiences who need expert explanation. Its rhythm is slow, its coverage is deep, its client tenure is long.
Factory is an activator. Factory's strength is engineering the cultural moment — the launch, the event, the visual — that makes a fashion or lifestyle brand the brand to talk about that week. Its rhythm is fast, its coverage is broad, its cadence is closer to a media cycle than an editorial calendar.
Both models work. Both have stayed independent by choice. The choice between them, for a brand or a founder, is really a choice about time horizon. Long compounding play — Gotham. Cultural moment engineering — Factory.
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