The mirrors arrived in Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels’s Clinton Hill apartment the way a particularly difficult piece of contemporary art might enter a gallery: with a cascade of unforeseen complications. The stairwell had been mismeasured, leaving no choice but to erect scaffolding at the eleventh hour to haul roughly 10-foot panes of heavy glass directly through an open window. “The neighbors were not used to that,” she recalls with a lighthearted laugh. While the episode required patience from everyone involved, it speaks volumes about something fundamental to Bellorado-Samuels’s living space: the entire home is conceived around the viewing experience.
Bellorado-Samuels began her professional trajectory in the art world 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 cultivated a distinct appetite for creative friction—a quality that informs her new domestic environment just as much as her career path. This same curatorial impulse is visible in her itinerant gallery project, We Buy Gold, which cleverly plays on the overlapping themes of art, commerce, and culture. It also explains her unconventional distaste for traditional, plush sofas, opting instead for functional chairs that are sculptural, experimental, and undeniably funky. Who else would allow the subtle tension between staying seated and nearly sliding onto the floor to dictate the layout of a living room?
Throughout the two-bedroom apartment, which Bellorado-Samuels painstakingly renovated over the course of four years, conceptual vision consistently triumphs over conventional notions of domestic comfort. There are the striking mirrors lining a wall at one end of the open-plan living area, adding profound dimension while dynamically reflecting the room and the streetscape outside. In the secondary bedrooms, typical storage space was deliberately sacrificed to maximize precious wall area for hanging works. In Bellorado-Samuels’s own bedroom, the television is neatly tucked away beneath the bed, ensuring that powerful works by artists such as Barkley Hendricks, Sadie Barnette, and Charisse Pearlina Weston take absolute pride of place. Meanwhile, the second bedroom was completely transformed to house a custom bookshelf that required ten grueling months to develop alongside millworker Paul Finsterwald, whom she originally met through her work in the gallery sphere.
That deeply rooted instinct to prioritize objects infused with meaning, personal history, and narrative sentiment traces back to San Francisco, where Bellorado-Samuels spent her formative years. Her father, Joe Sam, was a dedicated political activist and visionary artist who frequently incorporated found materials into his practice. “We would go to the train tracks and collect things for his art that would end up on the kitchen table,” she remembers, reflecting on her upbringing. “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 personal connection to this specific building began through another cherished childhood ritual, when she and her mother would spend their weekends touring neighborhood open houses. The mother-daughter duo revived the tradition one Mother’s Day as Bellorado-Samuels found herself actively hunting for a larger home. “I lined up a bunch of apartments to look at the weekend she came,” she notes. “This was one of them.”
The building itself offered historical charm that made it easy to fall in love. The front portion dates back to approximately 1850, while the rear was constructed around 1900, originally serving as a home for women with the back section functioning as an infirmary. After sitting vacant for years, it operated as the Bull Shippers Inn before falling into a state of severe disrepair, eventually acquiring the eerie atmosphere of a neighborhood haunted house. Eventually, the historic property was acquired, comprehensively rehabilitated, and thoughtfully divided into 26 distinct residential apartments.
Bellorado-Samuels remains deeply drawn to the physical traces of those previous lives: the preserved original façade, a mysterious little window that no one can quite explain, and even the imperfect patchwork of exposed brick that she otherwise confesses she dislikes. “Who know brick tell me it’s a really terrible patch job, but I love how ragtag and random it is,” she says.
It is this historic architecture that ultimately adds rich texture to the visual experience of the home. That interplay is what makes the apartment feel much less like a sterile private gallery and more like a carefully studied proposition for how to live alongside art. Bellorado-Samuels’s home does not disappear quietly behind her extensive collection; instead, it pushes back, amplifies, complicates, and occasionally inconveniences daily life in the best possible way. “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 you bring the mirrors in.
