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Add Texture to GoogleIn the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels’ apartment immediately breaks with the conventional norms of middle-class living. Here, the space is not organized around the passive comfort of a traditional living room. Instead of a sofa—the expected centerpiece of any reception area—one finds an arrangement of individual seats with sculptural lines. This choice, far from being a mere aesthetic whim, serves a specific purpose: to transform the home into a continuous viewing experience, where each seat is oriented toward the contemplation of artworks rather than domestic leisure.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels is no ordinary collector. As Senior Director at the Jack Shainman Gallery—a major institution on the New York art scene—and founder of the curatorial platform *We Buy Gold*, her daily life is shaped by the dialogue between art and its environment. Her professional journey, which began at the Studio Museum in Harlem before she became the assistant and collaborator of Claude Simard, co-founder of the Jack Shainman Gallery, permeates every square meter of her home. Her approach to space is that of a curator: walls are not boundaries, but surfaces for display.
The Logistics of the Gaze
The building, a historic structure dating from around 1850 and divided into 26 units, imposed its own constraints during a renovation that spanned four years. One of the most striking architectural features of this project is the installation of a wall of monumental mirrors in the living room. These panels, standing approximately three meters tall, were designed to reflect the windows and amplify the perception of space. However, the installation nearly resulted in a technical mishap: a measurement error in the stairwell made it impossible to move the mirrors through the interior passages. The solution required erecting scaffolding on the street to hoist the glass structures through the window—an emergency operation that underscores the project’s structural ambition.
This commitment to prioritizing the field of vision extends into the private areas. In the apartment’s two bedrooms, built-in closets and storage spaces were simply eliminated. This functional sacrifice frees up maximum wall space for displaying the gallery owner’s personal collection. In this hierarchy of needs, the opportunity to exhibit a work by Barkley L. Hendricks or Kerry James Marshall takes precedence over standard storage conveniences.
Custom Woodwork in Service of the Archive
The absence of standard furniture is offset by custom-made pieces, the result of long-standing collaborations with artisans. In the second bedroom, a monumental bookshelf dominates the space. Its design and construction took ten months to complete, led by cabinetmaker Paul Finsterwald, whom Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels met through her work at the gallery. This piece of woodwork serves not only as storage but also contributes to the apartment’s visual balance, blending in as a fixed element of the interior architecture.
Technology, too, has been deliberately set aside. The television screen—often the focal point of contemporary living rooms—is hidden from plain view here. It is concealed beneath the bed in the master bedroom, appearing only when its use is strictly necessary. This deliberate removal underscores the resident’s commitment: to ensure nothing distracts from the attention given to the works by Sadie Barnette and Charisse Pearlina Weston that adorn the space.
Artistic Heritage and Lineage
Beyond the established names in contemporary art, the apartment houses a more intimate legacy. Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels is the daughter of JoeSam (Joe Sam), an artist and activist whose work with assemblages of found materials was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her father’s pieces occupy a natural place within the collection, creating a direct link between family history and the gallerist’s professional practice.
Living in this Clinton Hill apartment requires a certain discipline of posture. By replacing the sofa with “sculptural and funky” seating, the gallery owner imposes a different rhythm on domestic life. The space is not designed for immediate rest, but for active observation. It is a place where the interior design does not seek to fade into the background, but rather to direct the eye toward what, for its occupant, is essential: the physical presence of art within the intimacy of everyday life.
