How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by

the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin.

Tony Saxon is a wiry, tattooed man in his early thirties who is proud of what he calls his “Jersey

gonzo” work ethic—that is, “I’ve got a guy, or I’ll get a guy.” His legal surname is Netelkos, but he

prefers the one that his father adopted while performing as a lounge singer with an Elvis-inspired

act. The younger Saxon had a sometimes chaotic and druggy youth; he now sustains himself with

Red Bull and can talk loudly and without interruption—but still with some charm—for four or five

hours. When we recently met in Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles, he arrived in a 1963 Ford

Thunderbird convertible.

Four years ago, Saxon moved to California from northern New Jersey and sublet an apartment in North Hollywood. He worked on TV commercials and as a handyman; he played in bands and recorded music. In September, 2021, a woman who introduced herself as Bianca inquired about his availability for construction work. He was available. A few days later, she texted, asking him to come to Malibu immediately. In a response that eventually led to a lawsuit against Ye, formerly Kanye West—the music and fashion star who in the past two years has become known for his public antisemitism and admiration of Hitler—Saxon said that he’d get his tools.

He drove down to the Santa Monica Pier, then headed northwest on the Pacific Coast Highway. For about ten miles, the road follows the ocean’s edge: if you live on the beach, you also live next to a four-lane highway. But just past the Malibu Pier the highway and the ocean separate, and for a few miles the beachfront properties line a calm residential street, Malibu Road, with speed bumps and dog-walkers. Stan Laurel used to live here.

The houses stand shoulder to shoulder, allowing little more than a glimpse of sky between them. Saxon pulled up to a two-story façade of smooth gray concrete. On the upper floor, the surface was interrupted only by an arrow-slit window; at street level, there was a wooden garage door, and a front door and a window, both made of milkily opaque glass.

The house, in Malibu, carefully guided inhabitants through indoor and outdoor spaces. It was sold to Ye—formerly Kanye West—in 2021, nine years after construction was complete. He admired Ando, and wanted an Ando, but didn’t “like the interior,” one of the architect’s former colleagues says.Video by Spencer Lowell for The New Yorker

Tony Saxon is a wiry, tattooed man in his early thirties who is proud of what he calls his “Jersey gonzo” work ethic—that is, “I’ve got a guy, or I’ll get a guy.” His legal surname is Netelkos, but he prefers the one that his father adopted while performing as a lounge singer with an Elvis-inspired act. The younger Saxon had a sometimes chaotic and druggy youth; he now sustains himself with Red Bull and can talk loudly and without interruption—but still with some charm—for four or five hours. When we recently met in Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles, he arrived in a 1963 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

Four years ago, Saxon moved to California from northern New Jersey and sublet an apartment in North Hollywood. He worked on TV commercials and as a handyman; he played in bands and recorded music. In September, 2021, a woman who introduced herself as Bianca inquired about his availability for construction work. He was available. A few days later, she texted, asking him to come to Malibu immediately. In a response that eventually led to a lawsuit against Ye, formerly Kanye West—the music and fashion star who in the past two years has become known for his public antisemitism and admiration of Hitler—Saxon said that he’d get his tools.

He drove down to the Santa Monica Pier, then headed northwest on the Pacific Coast Highway. For about ten miles, the road follows the ocean’s edge: if you live on the beach, you also live next to a four-lane highway. But just past the Malibu Pier the highway and the ocean separate, and for a few miles the beachfront properties line a calm residential street, Malibu Road, with speed bumps and dog-walkers. Stan Laurel used to live here.

The houses stand shoulder to shoulder, allowing little more than a glimpse of sky between them. Saxon pulled up to a two-story façade of smooth gray concrete. On the upper floor, the surface was interrupted only by an arrow-slit window; at street level, there was a wooden garage door, and a front door and a window, both made of milkily opaque glass.

A few months earlier, when the house had had a different owner, a visitor would have entered a little gallery-like space, with concrete walls and gray limestone floor tiles, filled with contemporary art. The house withholds its big Pacific reveal, and the clouded glass casts the gallery in pale light. The art here once included photographs of nuclear-weapons-test clouds and a life-size statue of a man, no longer in his youth, with his fists in a boxer’s pose. The sculpture, cast in aluminum and painted blue, is by the French artist Xavier Veilhan. It is a likeness of Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect.

Ando, who had a brief boxing career, designed the house. Now eighty-two, he has kept his practice small. He has one office, in his home city of Osaka, and has never employed more than thirty people. He works on only a few designs each year. Some are museums; many are houses; nearly all, including the house on Malibu Road—finished in 2013, for Richard Sachs, a former money manager—are made of concrete, poured on-site, and left unclad and unpainted, indoors and out. In what has become an Ando signature, the concrete’s velvety surface is marked by evenly spaced holes—small and shallow enough to be plugged by, say, a marshmallow.

The Malibu Road house has about four thousand square feet of indoor space. Another property of this scale, on this street, might sell for twenty million dollars. When Sachs put his house on the market, in 2020, he asked for seventy-five million. Sachs’s price, like his aluminum statue, suggests the extent to which an appreciation of Ando can take the form of veneration. For very wealthy people who spend some of their wealth on art, no living architect seems more likely to make them feel that they’re buying not just a fine home but the work of a major modern artist. An Ando house will require expensive and exacting construction; it will have a controlled, sober beauty that photographs well and that plainly communicates contemporary, if not avant-garde, taste. And it will be rare. The client will receive personal validation of the most tangible, bombproof kind. Ando has said that, after being introduced to potential clients, “my decision to accept their projects depends mainly on their personality and aura.” An American real-estate agent who has had some interactions with Ando recently told the Wall Street Journal that “it was like working with God.”