No Sofa, No Problem: A Gallerist's Brooklyn Home Built Around Art

Roughly 10-foot panes of mirror glass had to be hauled through a window on last-minute scaffolding because the stairs were mismeasured. "The neighbors were not used to that," says Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels with a laugh. The episode sets the tone for her Clinton Hill apartment in Brooklyn: it's a home designed entirely around the viewing experience.

Bellorado-Samuels started her career at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then joined Jack Shainman Gallery as an assistant to cofounder Claude Simard. She's now a senior director there. Her itinerant gallery project, We Buy Gold, plays on themes of art and commerce—and that same appetite for friction shapes her home. It's why there isn't a sofa in sight. She prefers chairs that are sculptural and funky, embracing what she calls the tension between staying seated and falling down.

What does the renovation change?

The two-bedroom apartment took four years to renovate, and concept consistently won out over comfort. The mirrors line a wall at one end of the open-plan living area, adding dimension and reflecting the room and its windows. In the extra bedrooms, storage gave way to wall space.

In her own bedroom, the television is stashed under the bed so that works by Barkley Hendricks, Sadie Barnett, and Charisse Pearlina Weston take pride of place. The second bedroom went to a custom bookshelf that took ten months to develop with a millworker, Paul Finsterwald, whom she met through the gallery.

Her instinct to prioritize meaningful objects has roots in San Francisco, where she grew up. Her father, Joe Sam, was a political activist and artist who often worked with found materials. "We would go to the train tracks and collect things for his art that would end up on the kitchen table," she remembers. "There's a certain practice of care you develop in just loving objects and the things that you live with. All you need is a little bit of restraint and you're golden."

How did she find the building?

The apartment hunt itself began with a childhood ritual. She and her mother spent weekends touring open houses, and the two revived the tradition one Mother's Day while she looked for more space. "I lined up a bunch of apartments to look at the weekend she came," she says. "This was one of them."

The building carried its own history. The front dates to around 1850 and the rear to around 1900. It was once a women's home, with the rear portion built as an infirmary. It sat vacant for years, then became the Bull Shippers Inn, which fell into disrepair and took on the atmosphere of a neighborhood haunted house. Eventually the property was bought, renovated, and divided into 26 apartments.

Bellorado-Samuels is drawn to the traces of those previous lives: the original façade, a strange little window no one can explain, and even the imperfect patchwork of exposed brick—a material she otherwise dislikes. "People who know brick tell me it's a really terrible patch job, but I love how ragtag and random it is," she says.

What does the apartment say about living with art?

That architecture is what makes the space feel less like a private gallery and more like a studied proposition for living with art. The home doesn't disappear behind the collection; it pushes back, amplifies, complicates, and occasionally inconveniences it.

"I like that in this space you can see all kinds of different art," she says. "People think they can't live with sculpture—I love living with sculpture. Do you just want paintings of flowers? That's fine, but there are other things." Just remember to measure twice.