Looks like Kanye West’s Tadao Ando–designed Malibu home—or at least what’s left of it, after the rapper fashioned it into what the New Yorker called “a ruin”—still has value to someone. Last month, TMZ reported that the roughly 4,000-square-foot, largely gutted beachfront property was put into escrow. Newly emerged details reveal the buyer as Belwood Investments, a crowdfunded house-flipping firm which secured the deed for just $21 million. The sale marks a $36 million loss for West, without factoring in the cost of his controversial renovations to the starchitect-designed structure.
The “Bound 2” musician reportedly ordered essentials like plumbing, electricity, doors, and windows removed from the already minimalist structure as part of his reimagining. The bare-bones abode has been in the news quite a few times since the Yeezy creator paid financier and art dealer Richard Sachs a whopping $57.3 million for it in 2021; West priced the mansion at $53 million in December before slashing $14 million off that in April.
Tony Saxon, a contractor hired to redo the interiors in the musician’s vision, told the New Yorker “It’s funny—and not funny, in a way—to say, ‘I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece.’ But I pretty much did.” With design briefs centered around “clarity and simplicity” coming from West, Saxon said he was instructed by the “Love Lockdown” rapper and his wife, architect Bianca Censori, to dismantle cabinets, counters, and walls. Saxon is now in the middle of a lawsuit he brought against West, claiming that the creative owes him a six-figure sum for unpaid work done on the house.
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West employed Jason Oppenheim, co-owner of real estate brokerage The Oppenheim Group and one of the stars of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, to find a buyer. “It will take several million dollars for the house to be finished,” Oppenheim told the Wall Street Journal in December. He also claimed that “much of the architectural integrity and the architectural value of the house exists.”
Belwood Investments plans to spend about $5 million to renovate and restore the building before putting it back on the market. “This is not just a phenomenal real estate investment; it is an opportunity to revitalize and preserve an architectural gem by the renowned Tadao Ando, ensuring it remains a jewel of Malibu,” CEO Bo Belmont said in a press release. The company hopes to re-sell the Brutalist dwelling in the $40-$50 million range.
Ando is the 1995 Pritzker Prize winner and his minimalist homes, built from concrete poured on-site, are coveted in the art and architecture worlds. Last year, Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped $200 million on one of his designs, purchasing it from art collector and soap opera heir Bill Bell Jr.—and smashing the record for California’s most expensive home in the process.
