“Kanye West bought an architectural treasure – then gave it a violent remix.”
The Chicago-born chanteur and fiddler of studio knobs, Kanye West, latterly known as Ye, is set to piss away roughly twenty mill after his troubled three-year renovation of an iconic Tadao Ando house in Malibu was stopped by city authorities and Ye figured maybe easier just to sell the joint.
Ye, who is forty-seven, was once married to the billionairess Kim Kardashian but now prefers the company of Melbourne architect Bianca Censori, famous for crotch-revving curves that surpass even his ex-wife.
The Tadao Ando Malibu House, which he bought for fifty-seven mill in 2021, became, for a time at least, an experiment where Ye indulged his fascination for architecture alongside his new gal’s university-honed skills.
In a just published story in the New Yorker, Ian Parker tells the compelling saga of Ye buying the joint from financier Richard Sachs, who originally wanted seventy-five mill for the house – and employing a cowboy tradesman called Tony Saxon to sleep in the place while simultaneously destroying it, eventually re-listing it for sale at $39 mill.
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According to Saxon, Ye told him, “I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re like a hurricane! I like you. I like your style.” As they walked through the stripped rooms, Ye kept asking, “You got this out? You did this?”
He began to describe his plans for the house. Saxon asked, “Are you telling me this hypothetically, or do you want me to do it?” Ye wanted him to do it. As Saxon saw it, “He was so sick of everyone around him.” Saxon demurred; he didn’t have a company or a license. He was just a dude with a minivan and some stamina. “But he goes, ‘You can do it! Don’t give me that. You can do this! Don’t say no!’ ” Recalling this, Saxon laughed. “Some inspiring shit!”
Saxon warmed to Ye, and not just because of the flattery. “I’m not in any way familiar with his music,” he told me. “But I kind of got him. We are very similar in a lot of ways.” Saxon had been given his own bipolar diagnosis and detected in Ye some similar behaviors. Later, after they got to know each other a little, Saxon brought this up. “I’m, like, ‘Are you on medication for it? I just started taking it a couple of months ago, and it fucking helped me.’ ”
Ye suggested that Saxon wear black and told him to be discreet: there were no permits for work on the house. Saxon’s storytelling, like Ye’s, can digress, and his experience on Malibu Road, which lasted about six weeks, is now the subject of his lawsuit, which centers on alleged underpayment and a back injury. But the outline of events is clear, and many of the details are confirmed by photographs and messages archived on Saxon’s phone. Within a few days of that first meeting, Saxon had become something much closer to a project leader than to a day laborer.
He helped assemble a small crew by enlisting people he knew and a few outside contractors who’d been working at the house when he showed up. Starting on the day he met Ye, Saxon didn’t go home for several weeks. He found a mattress at the house; a friend later brought him some clothing in a trash bag, and his guitar. Saxon began taking the house apart.
Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers.
And after.
24844 Malibu Road is currently listed with the Netflix-famous Oppenheim group in Malibu.
