Kanye West has turned upside down the Tadao Ando villa he bought, and now he's reselling

The Malibu villa purchased by musician and designer Ye (aka Kanye West), and designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando, has a very controversial history. In a recent article, the popular American magazine The New Yorker reported a detailed account of the demolition of the house, through the revelations of the contractor Tony Saxon, who carried out the renovation work. Kanye West bought the mansion in 2021 for the sum of $57.3 million from Richard Sachs, a financier and art collector. Just in '21 Tadao Ando was guest editor of Domus. 

The New Yorker's report shows how West disrupted Ando's original work, radically altering the original design. "Censori asked Saxon to paint the shelves, the cabinets, and the marble in the bathroom in a shade that would hide the boundaries between these surfaces and the untreated concrete of the walls. He said of the owner: 'He doesn't want the wood to show. Saxon had a moment's hesitation: the paint would look bad (and soon peel off)".

And that was just the beginning. Subsequent demands were even more extreme, leading to the complete demolition of key elements of the original design. The house, initially characterised by elements typical of Ando's architecture such as the exposed use of concrete and the study of natural light, was to become a kind of refuge, a "batcave" as the rapper liked to call it. 

The changes included replacing the stairs with ramps and removing the chimney, in a design that reflected West's eccentric personality and artistic aspirations more than his desire to live in a work of contemporary architecture while respecting its soul. "He wanted everything to be his own work," says Saxon, summing up the radical approach of one of the most controversial figures on the contemporary art scene. "There would be a cell-like capsule to provide some basic human needs, from which one could reach a large semi-public space open to the sky," reports The New Yorker. "It was a vision less of a home than of a refuge within a striking piece of concrete art." Renovation stopped at demolition, and today the mansion is for sale for $39 million.