"When I was a younger man, bartending by day and playing in a band all night with my friends, I made a promise to myself that when I turned 40 I would have my own restaurant and a Ferrari," says Bertrand Delacroix, who, having reached his fourth decade, can happily say that he has succeeded —and then some. Inside his Brooklyn, N.Y., house—which spans an entire 16,000-square-foot building—a 2007 yellow Ferrari F430 shares space with no fewer than four Porsches, each vehicle parked nonchalantly among his furniture. As for his culinary aspirations, Delacroix owns the French bistro next door. "What can I say," he says with a laugh. "I’m a fanatic."

In fact, Delacroix is many things: a French expat, an art dealer with five galleries throughout the U.S., a hang-gliding enthusiast, a bachelor, a former soldier, a serigrapher.… But above all, he is a collector. It is hard to judge, though, which of his various assemblages is the most impressive. In addition to vintage automobiles and motorcycles, Delacroix displays 1940s French bicycles with gas engines alongside Japanese dirt bikes. Graphic contemporary artwork rotates constantly throughout his space, while more than 1,000 vintage posters are stored in the basement. A hang glider hovers, frozen in mid-flight, over the main room. Then there is his personal menagerie, comprised of a trio of wrinkly pugs that travel with him everywhere he goes. "They were all given to me as gifts!" he protests unconvincingly.

Delacroix’s odyssey from restaurant worker to art world impresario begins with his childhood in Tübingen, Germany, where he grew up steeped in the turpentine and oil paint world of his father, the well-known naïf artist Michel Delacroix. After his father’s work received some recognition in art circles, the family moved to Connecticut, where Delacroix attended high school. He and his family then moved to Paris when he was 16. After a year spent in the French army, Delacroix "completely gave up on the idea of school, and got back to the United States as fast as I could—I wanted to play music," he recalls. There he lived a bohemian life throughout his 20s, bartending in an upscale French restaurant in Manhattan and playing the trumpet and saxophone into the wee hours, crammed into the tiny apartment that he shared with six roommates. "We lived like there was no tomorrow," he says.

One day, a well-dressed patron came into the bar where Delacroix worked. He had noticed the man before, primarily because "he always arrived in a different sports car, with a different woman on his arm," Delacroix recalls. The two began a conversation, and the man advised Delacroix that if he really wanted to succeed, he should go back to school. The younger man took his advice, and soon after his college graduation in the early 1990s, he opened his first art gallery. There he specialized in silk-screening by hand, printing limited editions on paper and canvas. After a couple of prosperous years, Delacroix opened Axelle Fine Arts in SoHo and in the 15 years since, his business has grown to include galleries in New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, and New York’s Chelsea district. Today he employs more than 80 people.

Around 2000, Delacroix started looking for a mixed-use building out of which he could operate various arms of his business, as well as make a home that could serve as a part-time showroom for exhibitions and private parties for collectors and dealers. He found what he was looking for in the Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn, a quickly developing neighborhood filled with 19th-century brownstones and tree-lined streets. The structure, which is the former headquarters of the National Cash Register Company, is a 1930s Art Deco landmark. Delacroix spent a year and $2 million updating it, and now it is exactly what a man like Delacroix needs—a showplace.

The glass-clad front entrance opens directly to a 5,000-square-foot rectangular room with a soaring 22-foot-tall ceiling and an original terrazzo floor. This is Delacroix’s main gallery and living space, where artworks hang both at eye level and overhead along a catwalk that surrounds the upper portion of the room. In order to protect the art and combat the intense sunlight streaming through the room’s expansive windows, Delacroix treated the glass with a UV film and worked with a lighting designer to install track and recessed lighting outfitted with sophisticated dimming mechanisms. He switches the artwork often, moving pieces to and from his various galleries, to his restaurant next door, and then back again. "Sometimes I feel like keeping the show all to myself," he admits.Tucked in the back are his private living quarters, with a large bedroom and bath, and a kitchen fit for a professional chef, replete with azure-hued cabinetry and ebony countertops. A 1920s freight elevator accesses the business side of things, including the basement, where he maintains his shipping and receiving dock, as well as the third floor, where his fine art printing operation is situated. Upon returning to the main floor, however, the elevator opens to Delacroix’s version of living room furniture––a 1963 Porsche Coupe 356, red-leather Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs and Le Corbusier sofas, and, in the center of it all, a carved-wood pool table.

Even after creating a grown-up’s playground filled with every toy he has ever wanted, Delacroix is still constantly looking for ways to escape. Since he avoids driving his vehicles in the city—"too many potholes, too many cops, too much attention," he says—he motors to the more pastoral areas surrounding Manhattan, like the Catskills or New Hampshire, to indulge in his love of hang gliding whenever he can. "It’s a great way to fly," says Delacroix, who often travels upstate by motorcycle with one of his dogs, Hugo Maximillian, and even takes to the sky with him, having custom-installed a dog-size harness in one of his gliders (he claims Hugo shares his passion for adventure). As fantastical as a hang-gliding pug or a vintage Porsche parked next to the living room sofa might be to some, for Bertrand Delacroix, it seems absolutely anything is possible.

Savoir Fare

"When I first bought my building, I would eat at the restaurant next door every day," says Bertrand Dela-croix. "They never changed their menu, so after awhile I became bored with the food." But the convenience of the location was hard to ignore, especially during the year it took to renovate his space. Eventually, Delacroix found a chance to buy in. "I purchased a stake, worked with a new chef, and all at once," he says, "I satisfied a long personal dream by having a restaurant of my own."

Called Jolie, Delacroix’s place is a French bistro with cozy banquette seating, a generous open-air patio surrounded by a picket fence, and a rotating roster of seasonal dishes, traditional Gallic fare like steak tartare and crepes Suzette, and prix fixe offerings. There are certain aesthetic commonalities between the restaurant and Delacroix’s home—from the modern Italian pendant lights to the constantly changing array of contemporary artworks on the wall. In fact, Delacroix uses the restaurant as an extension of his home and gallery, often hosting clients and buyers for dinner after exhibitions or parties. He continues to use it as an outpost to his own kitchen, stopping by almost every day, as he did even before he owned it. The only difference is that now, between the chef’s continually evolving menu, the wine that Delacroix helped to select, and his own art hanging on the walls, it’s a fair certainty that he won’t get bored.