Photo: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
A trial is finally giving us a sense of what Kanye West might possibly have been thinking when he bought a $57.3 million Tadao Ando mansion, then paid a man to gut it, only to put it up for sale. That fiasco was an extremely bad business move that some interpreted as an expensive act of vengeance on an Ando-loving ex.
But according to a lawyer for Tony Saxon, the man paid to rip out marble and custom cabinetry, West wanted to turn the luxurious home into an “off-the-grid shelter” with no windows, no electricity, and, most curiously, no plumbing. “He wanted no toilets,” said Saxon’s lawyer Ron Zambrano, per Rolling Stone’s report on the trial. “If people had to go No. 2, it was a hole in the ground.”
Saxon, a rare-record dealer who isn’t licensed as a contractor, was tapped by West to not just gut the home but to live in it — camping out overnight and on alert for break-ins, according to the suit he filed in 2023, seeking back pay for the work and damages for injuries he says he got on the job, including a broken neck.
In court this week, West’s lawyer, Andrew Cherkasky, claimed that Saxon was the one who insisted on sleeping at the house so he could finish the job before he was “busted for being unlicensed,” per Rolling Stone. He also reportedly disputed the idea that West wanted a beachfront parking garage, instead saying his client was looking for an experience for his family that was closer to beach camping. Saxon, he said in court, “destroyed the Ando house.”
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