Looking for a bargain beach house? Then you’re in luck. Kanye West has just lowered the price on his minimalist mansion in Malibu, California, to a mere $39m (£31.5m) – a $14m discount on its original listing price. There is a catch though: the house has no windows, doors, electricity, plumbing or interior finishes. It’s completely uninhabitable, unless you happen to be a gull.
The sparseness isn’t a deliberate design choice – though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. West, who also goes by the name Ye, is after all a man who opened up a lawsuit-magnet of a private school in Los Angeles called Donda Academy which, according to court filings, had empty windows because the musician “doesn’t like glass”. Ye is, to put it in the politest terms possible, an individual with eccentric tastes.
Still, the reason that the mansion looks like it has been abandoned to the elements is not because of aesthetics; it’s because it has, in fact, been abandoned to the elements. Back in 2021 – shortly before brands cut ties with Ye for a series of outrageous antisemitic remarks – the entertainer, flush with cash, spent $57m (£46m) on the pad. The attraction? It was one of just a handful of homes in the US designed by Tadao Ando, a celebrated Japanese architect. Ando is known for his concrete box houses which look like hideous bunkers to my untrained eye but are, apparently, architectural marvels. ARTnews, for example, called the residence, “part house, part sculpture”.
Despite the fact that he’d spent top dollar on a “part sculpture”, Ye decided to completely gut and redesign the place. According to a contractor who is now suing Ye for labour code violations and unpaid wages, Ye wanted it to look like a “bomb shelter from the 1910s”. He reportedly planned on replacing all the stairs with slides and “wanted no electricity”. I mean, the guy could have saved himself $57m and just gone and lived in a squat.
Eventually, Ye gave up the whole project. Not because it was completely bonkers, mind you, but because he thought the house was the wrong shade of grey. “Unfortunately, the concrete settled into more of a cadet gray and he was hoping for a warmer tone, more of dovetail gray or coachman’s cape,” an insider told the Daily Mail. “Ye would only visit the house at sunrise and sunset, when he said the color didn’t irritate him so much. Eventually, he stopped going altogether.” Must be nice, in the middle of a global housing crisis, to have a cool $57m to spend on a house that you immediately destroy, eh?
He isn’t the only celebrity to spend a fortune on a house only to wreck it. Chris Pratt and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, recently dropped $12.5m [£10m] on a mid-century home, designed by renowned architect Craig Ellwood, which had been featured in architectural magazines. The pair caused a huge uproar last week, after they razed the house to the ground to build a 15,000-sq ft modern farmhouse mansion.
The modern farmhouse, for those who aren’t familiar with the style, is the architectural equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte: ubiquitous and insipid. The New York Times has called it “the millennial answer to the baby boomer McMansion” and mused that its popularity might be a response to social upheaval. In times of uncertainty, the NYT has noted, it feels fitting that Americans are gravitating towards “a look that makes you think of Little House on the Prairie, but only if the Ingalls family lived in the suburbs and worked in finance”.
The Pratt-Schwarzenegger mansion may be wasteful and uninspired but at least it sounds cosier than a bomb shelter from the 1910s. Indeed, in the grand scheme of celebrity mansions, it’s not so bad. It’s certainly more inviting than Kim Kardashian’s beige concrete house, which has been compared to a “psych ward”. Her house is so anaemic she gives staff guidelines on how to colour-coordinate with the neutral tones and apparently buys beige snacks for her kids. And, as if one extremely grey house isn’t enough, Kardashian is building a fleet of them: she’s currently working on a spaceship-shaped house in Palm Springs, California, that she describes as “concrete, grey-toned, and really Zen.” As Dorothy Parker said: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
