“A tree is the shape of a tree, because that’s what nature does or whatever,” Censori says. “What does a house want to be? And that, I feel, will be my life’s work.”
(The couple’s new home, in Beverly Hills, is the subject of an HOA dispute with their more architecturally conservative neighbors. “It was built in the 2000s, but it looks like someone was like, ‘Hey, have you seen that movie Blow? That’s what I want! An ’80s cocaine house,’ ” Censori says. “Anytime anyone comes over, I’m like, ‘Do not look at the house.’ ”)
Censori also liked that an expression of ego—this supposed Malibu masterpiece—was being used in a way that hadn’t been intended. “They have this idea of, ‘Okay, once I have this home, and I’ve handed it off to the client, it has to remain the same way as when I passed it off,’ ” Censori says of architects. “But that’s not how people use space. I think that the destruction of the home was beautiful to me, and I think symbolic also of that time.”
The year Ye purchased the house, Kim Kardashian filed for divorce, a decision she subsequently attributed partially to his “mental breaks,” which were reported, self-documented, and frequently made into music. Around the same general period, Censori and Ye were falling in love. “Proximity,” Censori offers by way of explanation. “Just working together. You’re spending so much time with somebody. So we’d be either on the phone together or with each other all the time.” His aura both overpowered her and complemented her own. “You’ve got to see it,” Censori says of his magnetism. “We’re so similar.”
Suddenly Censori was experiencing what her producer Ted Lawson calls “the banality of extravagance. When you’re in the bubble [Ye is in], it’s ubiquitous.” Censori joined a kind of chaotic privilege captured in the 2025 documentary of Ye, In Whose Name? The doc was made over six years and comprised footage shot by Nico Ballesteros, to whom Ye gave seemingly complete access, letting the young stranger film him for more than half a decade.
Despite her inability to moderate in personal relationships, Censori does not make herself seem like an obvious fit for this environment with her rigorous restraint—in her academic and artistic pursuits, in her stringent silence. However, Lawson says, “She’s completely natural there, amazingly. It doesn’t faze her, in my view. You know, it’s normal reality. As an entity, she already has a kind of iconic vibe and a sense of herself, and whether people understand what that means or not doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t marry my husband because I wanted some sort of platform,” Censori says. “I married him because I love him. Is that like the corniest thing ever?”
