Ye’s obvious dangerous blood with staircases seems to run so deep that the rapper, previously often known as Kanye West, tried to switch the steps inside a uncommon Malibu house designed by a famed Japanese architect.
For months, Ye has been making an attempt to promote his beachfront property on Malibu Highway in Southern California.
The house — certainly one of a handful of residential properties within the US designed by the enduring Japanese architect Tadao Ando — is the topic of an ongoing lawsuit filed by Tony Saxon.
Saxon was the challenge supervisor Ye commissioned in 2021 to supervise the home’s redesign. He’s accusing the artist of placing him in harmful working situations and failing to pay his wages.
Ye’s legal professional didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Since he was employed, Saxon acquired numerous calls for from Ye, together with stripping the property of its home windows, plumbing, and different facilities, in response to the lawsuit.
Tony Saxon
A video supplied to The New Yorker reveals Saxon’s coworker smashing the house’s glass balustrade with a hammer.
One other request from Ye was to switch the house’s concrete staircase with a ramp or a slide, Saxon advised The New Yorker.
Saxon had proposed to the artist a slide manufactured from chrome steel whereas Bianca Censori, Ye’s spouse, despatched her husband three renderings of a concrete ramp, in response to The New Yorker.
Ye has publicly shared his curious disdain for staircases.
In a 2022 interview with Alo Yoga cofounder Danny Harris, Ye stated he was “actually large on outlawing stairs” and that every one properties ought to be designed to cater to older adults.
“We will have up-ramp however not upstairs,” he stated. “Every little thing ought to be designed like an old-folks house.”
Ye’s fraught view of stairs has even been talked about in a lawsuit filed by former workers members of Donda Academy, Ye’s secretive personal college.
The ex-employees alleged within the go well with that Donda Academy college students weren’t allowed to have class on the second ground as a result of 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.
Regardless of the artist’s imaginative and prescient for universally designed properties, The New Yorker’s Ian Parker, who reported on Ye’s Malibu house and visited the property, wrote that the ramps that Ye proposed “seemed to be a minimum of 4 occasions as steep as any allowed by the Individuals with Disabilities Act.”
Parker additionally wrote that the ramps ended close to the sting of the house’s terrace that misplaced its barrier or railings throughout the demolition course of.
“Somebody descending the ramp from the first bed room on, say, a skateboard, may count on to shoot off the sting and land some thirty ft beneath, on the seaside,” Parker wrote.
Ye’s incomplete work on the house has basically made the house uninhabitable because of the lack of energy and plumbing.
The Malibu house was first listed final yr with the Oppenheim Group actual property agency for $53 million. The asking worth has since been diminished to $39 million.
Jason Oppenheim of Oppenheim Group advised The New Yorker {that a} full renovation would price a minimum of $5 million.
A spokesperson for Oppenheim Group didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
