Bed-Stuy Avant-Garde: Inside the Eclectic Apartment of a Brooklyn Designer and Shop Owner

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To say that Kai Avent-deLeon is juggling a lot would be an understatement. She’s the owner and visionary behind the Brooklyn concept shop Sincerely, Tommy (and its in-house cafe), and she’s currently overseeing construction on a new project, a restaurant and boutique hostel set to open in the fall—all in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood where she was born and raised. She’s a designer in her own right, creating pieces for Sincerely, Tommy’s in-house clothing line and sculptural furniture for her own apartment, and painting on the side.

But entrepreneurship—and an appreciation for design—runs in the family. Avent-deLeon’s grandmother bought a handful of buildings in Bed-Stuy in the 1980s that she now rents out, and her mother is also in real estate. “They both have such a strong sense of individual style,” says Avent-deLeon, 30. “Every holiday growing up, my grandmother would have a guy come over and decorate her apartment. He had very eccentric style, and she’d let him have free rein. Seeing things like that and the art shows she would host and her very expressive style helped me develop my own.”

When a unit opened recently in one of her grandmother’s apartment buildings on Jefferson Avenue, the women worked to renovate the kitchen and bath on a budget, leaving the original dark moldings and mirrors intact; then Avent-deLeon fitted it with a shop owner’s eye and objects picked up in her travels. She and her partner moved in three months ago—one week after their baby was born. Take a look at the finished apartment, by turns gallery-like and playful.

Photography by Mel Walbridge for Remodelista.

the front door of the apartment opens into the dining room, with dark, original 17 — Above: The front door of the apartment opens into the dining room, with dark, original molding and moody light. “It makes me feel very adult,” Avent-deLeon says. She bought the midcentury-style marble table via Craigslist, from a man peddling lookalikes of classic designs out of his truck.

a sculptural yellow chair was a chance find on instagram: &#8\2\20;it&# 18 — Above: A sculptural yellow chair was a chance find on Instagram: “It’s by a young designer named Kelly Infield. Because of the algorithm on Instagram, I always get suggested home design feeds, and she popped up on the ‘you should follow’ page. I commented on it and said, ‘Where is this chair from?’ She said she made it, so I messaged her and begged her to let me carry it in the store. Solange [Knowles] wanted to buy it but we couldn’t find a way to ship it, so I thought that was a sign that it should be in my home. It adds a more playful feel to the room.”

Avent-deLeon designed the red dining chairs with arched backs, and hired Sammy Leon, a local woodworker who builds cabinets for her grandmother’s apartments, to make them.