Ye’s apparent bad blood with staircases appears to run so deep that the rapper, formerly known as Kanye West, tried to replace the stairs inside a rare Malibu home designed by a famed Japanese architect.
For months, Ye has been trying to sell his beachfront property on Malibu Road in Southern California.
The home — one of a handful of residential properties in the US designed by the iconic Japanese architect Tadao Ando — is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit filed by Tony Saxon.
Saxon was the project manager Ye commissioned in 2021 to oversee the house’s redesign. He is accusing the artist of putting him in dangerous working conditions and failing to pay his wages.
Ye’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Since he was hired, Saxon received a number of demands from Ye, including stripping the property of its windows, plumbing, and other amenities, according to the lawsuit.
Tony Saxon
A video provided to The New Yorker shows Saxon’s coworker smashing the home’s glass balustrade with a hammer.
Another request from Ye was to replace the home’s concrete staircase with a ramp or a slide, Saxon told The New Yorker.
Saxon had proposed to the artist a slide made of stainless steel while Bianca Censori, Ye’s wife, sent her husband three renderings of a concrete ramp, according to The New Yorker.
Ye has publicly shared his curious disdain for staircases.
In a 2022 interview with Alo Yoga cofounder Danny Harris, Ye said he was “really big on outlawing stairs” and that all homes should be designed to cater to older adults.
“We can have up-ramp but not upstairs,” he said. “Everything should be designed like an old-folks home.”
Ye’s fraught view of stairs has even been mentioned in a lawsuit filed by former staff members of Donda Academy, Ye’s secretive private school.
The ex-employees alleged in the suit that Donda Academy students were not allowed to have class on the second floor because the artist was “reportedly afraid of stairs.”
The lawsuit accused Ye of seven labor code violations and discrimination. A trial is scheduled for April 2025.
Despite the artist’s vision for universally designed homes, The New Yorker’s Ian Parker, who reported on Ye’s Malibu home and visited the property, wrote that the ramps that Ye proposed “appeared to be at least four times as steep as any allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
Parker also wrote that the ramps ended near the edge of the home’s terrace that lost its barrier or railings during the demolition process.
“Someone descending the ramp from the primary bedroom on, say, a skateboard, could expect to shoot off the edge and land some thirty feet below, on the beach,” Parker wrote.
Ye’s incomplete work on the home has essentially made the home uninhabitable due to the lack of power and plumbing.
The Malibu home was first listed last year with the Oppenheim Group real estate firm for $53 million. The asking price has since been reduced to $39 million.
Jason Oppenheim of Oppenheim Group told The New Yorker that a full renovation would cost at least $5 million.
A spokesperson for Oppenheim Group did not immediately return a request for comment.
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