Inside gallerist Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels's art-filled Clinton Hill apartment, Brooklyn

Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a senior director at Jack Shainman Gallery who started out at the Studio Museum in Harlem, has a taste for friction, and her Clinton Hill apartment shows it. There is no sofa. Instead, sculptural and slightly funky chairs, among them an Urs Fischer piece in foam, wood and steel and a vintage Rodolfo Bonetto armchair, ask you to look as much as sit. Even the wall of mirrors in the living area arrived awkwardly: mismeasured stairs meant scaffolding and roughly ten-foot panes hauled through a window.

Over four years of renovation, concept won out over comfort. Spare bedrooms gave up storage for wall space, the television hides under her bed, and one room became a library around a custom bookshelf that took ten months to make with millworker Paul Finsterwald. The walls carry Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Barkley L. Hendricks and Sadie Barnette, alongside a Valentine's Day sculpture her artist-activist father, Joe Sam, made for her mother.

The building has its own layers: a front from around 1850, a rear built around 1900 as an infirmary for a women's home, a spell as the Bull Shippers Inn, then decay before its division into 26 flats. She loves its patchy brick precisely because it is, by her account, a terrible repair. A private home, and a good read for anyone who suspects they can't live with sculpture.

Our summary of a story from Architectural Digest, published 21 October 2026. Read the original

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