The mirrors came into Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels’s Clinton Hill apartment the way a difficult artwork might enter a gallery: with a notable degree of complication. Due to a mismeasurement of the building’s stairs, contractors were forced to erect scaffolding at the last minute in order to hoist roughly 10-foot panes of glass directly through a window. "The neighbors were not used to that," she recalls with a laugh. While the episode required patience from those living nearby, the moment speaks to something essential about Bellorado-Samuels’s home: the entire residence is designed around the viewing experience.
Bellorado-Samuels began her career in the arts at the Studio Museum in Harlem before joining the renowned Jack Shainman Gallery as an assistant to cofounder Claude Simard. Now serving as a senior director at the gallery, she has developed an intellectual and professional appetite for friction that informs her new living space just as much as her career trajectory. The same impulse—evident in her itinerant gallery project, We Buy Gold, which critically plays on the intersections of art and commerce—drives her distaste for conventional sofas in favor of chairs that are sculptural, challenging, and occasionally funky. Who would have guessed that the visual tension between staying seated and nearly falling down could successfully drive the design of a contemporary living room?
Throughout the two-bedroom apartment, which Bellorado-Samuels meticulously renovated over the course of four years, conceptual vision triumphs over conventional comfort. There are, of course, the soaring mirrors that line a wall at one end of the open-plan living area, adding remarkable dimension while reflecting the room and the natural light pouring through the windows. In the auxiliary bedrooms, traditional storage was intentionally sacrificed in favor of expansive wall space to showcase her growing collection. In Bellorado-Samuels’s own bedroom, the television is discreetly stashed under the bed, ensuring that works by artists such as Barkley Hendricks, Sadie Barnette, and Charisse Perlina Weston take absolute pride of place. Meanwhile, the second bedroom was entirely transformed to house a custom bookshelf, a project that took ten months to develop alongside millworker Paul Finsterwald, whom she originally met through her work in the gallery world.
That underlying instinct to prioritize pieces with deep meaning and personal sentiment has its roots in San Francisco, where Bellorado-Samuels grew up. Her father, Joe Sam, was a dedicated political activist and artist who frequently incorporated found materials into his creative practice. "We would go to the train tracks and collect things for his art that would end up on the kitchen table," she remembers of her childhood. "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."
Her relationship to this specific apartment began with another cherished childhood ritual, when she and her mother would spend weekends touring open houses together. The two revived the tradition one Mother’s Day as Bellorado-Samuels found herself actively on the hunt for more living space. "I lined up a bunch of apartments to look at the weekend she came," she says. "This was one of them."
The historic building itself offered plenty of compelling reasons to fall in love. The front portion of the structure dates back to around 1850, while the rear was constructed around 1900. Historically, the property operated as a women’s home, with the rear portion originally built to function as an infirmary. After sitting vacant for years, it was transformed into the Bull Shippers Inn, a local establishment that eventually fell into severe disrepair, gradually acquiring the moody, atmospheric aura of a neighborhood haunted house. Eventually, the property was acquired by developers, completely renovated, and successfully divided into 26 distinct residential apartments.
Bellorado-Samuels remains deeply drawn to the physical traces of those previous lives: the original architectural façade, a strange little window that no one can quite explain, and even the imperfect patchwork of the exposed brick walls that she otherwise might have overlooked. "Who know brick tell me it’s a really terrible patch job, but I love how ragtag and random it is," she notes.
It is precisely this kind of layered architecture that adds tangible texture to the viewing experience. That, ultimately, is what prevents the apartment from feeling like a sterile private gallery, transforming it instead into a thoughtful, studied proposition for living intimately with art. Bellorado-Samuels’s home does not disappear quietly behind her impressive collection; rather, it pushes back, amplifies, complicates, and occasionally inconveniences it in fascinating ways. "I like that in this space you can see all kinds of different art," she explains. "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 before bringing the mirrors in.