SATIRE
AT HOME ON MALIBU ROAD
A PENSIVE LUSTRE; A SHALLOW BRILLIANCE
In the aftermath of a very public divorce, multi-hyphenate superstar Kim Kardashian sought solace in the most unlikely of passion projects: renovating her ex-husband’s former beachfront mansion. With the help of master architect Tadao Ando, she breathed new life into the minimalist masterpiece, recasting it (quite literally) as a home for her astonishing and utterly singular contemporary art collection, including, of course, the most celebrated and prolific masterpiece of all: herself.
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Malibu, it has been written, is “the most idiosyncratic of beach communities”
“It is not a resort. No one “vacations” or “holidays,” as those words are conventionally understood, at Malibu. Its principal residential street, the Pacific Coast Highway, is quite literally a highway, California 1, which runs from the Mexican border to the Oregon line and brings Greyhound buses and refrigerated produce trucks and sixteen-wheel gasoline tankers hurtling past the front windows of houses frequently bought and sold for over a million dollars. The water off Malibu is neither as clear nor as tropically coloured as the water off La Jolla. The beaches at Malibu are neither as white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never before seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life”
Perhaps then, the author of these words would be unsurprised if not still distraught at what this community has become — or more to the point, what it has remained — some fifty years after her instantly canonical assessment was penned. Writing in 1978, Joan Didion, in her extraordinary, inimitable way, perfectly and completely divined the essential character of the place and immortalised it in her crystalline prose. Malibu: an astonishment and a disappointment? Now, more than ever.
For indeed, Malibu remains today, in every meaningful sense, precisely as Didion recorded it nearly five decades ago: a curious, slippery, interstitial place lacking in any durable qualities, yet still looming impossibly large in the collective imagination as a place of supreme aspiration. Now, as then, it is a defiantly anti-urban town: a mostly linear agglomeration of multi-million-dollar homes, clinging perilously to a nearly sheer coastline, jutting out defiantly, absurdly, obscenely over the roiling surf. Year after year, decade after decade, Nature, whether through fire or flood or landslide or some baroque combination thereof, reclaims what is rightfully hers, only to find, year after year, decade after decade, that the citizens of this strange non-place — often famous and uniformly rich — have reconstituted it even more brazenly than before: each time bigger, each time better, each time more like the idea of itself, which is to say, a place that has never actually existed. A glorious collective delusion nurtured and sustained by movies and music and cars and dolls and successive waves of rich and famous residents, each more deliriously famous and rich than their immediate predecessors and therefore even more in need of the solace that they believe only a place like Malibu can provide.
Because after all, that is what Malibu is most of all: a place that is sustained by the myth of itself. It is everything, and it is nothing, and it is entirely up to the individual to mould it into the ideal that it claims to be. To arrive in Malibu and find it somehow or in any way lacking is never a reflection of the place itself, but always a reflection of you and your inability to bend this non-place to your own desires. You must not have wanted it badly enough; you must not have believed in it fervently enough; you must not really deserve the good life that is so manifestly on offer in this dim, dusty, too-rugged twenty-one-mile stretch of coastline, here at the end of the world.
For to stand on the beach in Malibu and gaze out at the churning, murky, grey-blue sea is undeniably to feel as though you have left the world behind and arrived at the end of things: somewhere quiet and apart and unspoilt. And that, above all other fictions that Malibu claims, and perpetuates, and anoints itself with is the one that endures. An idyll. An escape. A refuge from the world that is far too much.
And yet, and yet, and yet! What have you actually escaped or transgressed in a place like Malibu? Just there, not thirty miles down the road — the one road in and out of this place — the awful, monstrous machine hums and buzzes and whirs and groans, growing ever-louder, glowing ever brighter, incandescent with money and fame and power. You can see it — literally see it! — just back there, over the hill and around the bend. And you can certainly feel it: its vibrations permeate every inch of your home, and every fold of your psyche. And even though you might protest the incursion of the too-much world into this, your place of supreme refuge, you wouldn’t actually have it any other way. Because no one who is actually serious about getting away from “it” all — “it” being money and fame and commerce and power and the whole ghastly apparatus that undergirds our world — would ever seriously choose Malibu. It is far to proximate to the whole ghastly apparatus; far too dependent on it; far too in thrall to it.
Certainly that was the case for Didion herself, who by the end of the seventies, driven first from New York, and then from Los Angeles, and finally from Malibu by despair, desolation, and mortal peril, respectively, was forced to confront and finally make peace with the awful, monstrous machine humming and buzzing and whirring and groaning just down the road, and admit that for all of her exquisitely rendered protestations, she was undeniably and irrevocably a creature of it through-and-through.
It is perhaps then ironic, or maybe just appealingly symmetrical, that today, the most notable resident occupying the most notorious residence in all of Malibu, is a woman who is purely and completely, gleefully and unrepentantly, now and forever without qualm or compunction, a creature of the machine. Through-and-through.
Kim Kardashian never set out to buy the home at 24844 Malibu Road, but like so many things in her improbable and astonishing life, a curious and rather unprecedented chain of events unfurled before her, she intuited an opportunity, then seized upon it to spectacular effect.
Her ex-husband, the equally prolific but rather more self-immolating creative impresario Kanye West had purchased the home, sight unseen, in 2021, during a particularly acrimonious period of their divorce proceedings. At the time, communication between the two was limited, and largely mediated by a phalanx of lawyers, managers, agents, financial advisors, assistants, nannies, security personnel, personal trainers, spiritual consultants et al, who, even in happier times, had managed their enormously complex shared network of business and personal interests. Given the strain of their separation and the demands of parenting their four young children, to say nothing of the almost unfathomable pressure of simply being Kim Kardashian, she scarcely paid Mr. West’s acquisition any mind.
“It wasn’t uncommon for [Kanye] to buy new homes, like, super randomly and super-impulsively…and he was like, obsessed with Japanese architecture, obviously…” Kim explains as she roams about the boldly reimagined foyer of the Tadao Ando-designed Malibu Road residence, her elliptical pacing contrasting neatly with the economy and incisiveness of her carefully chosen words.
“And like, I get how it can be hard for people to, like, actually understand, but like, at a certain level these crazy-seeming purchases just become, like, literally nothing, you know? Like, I was talking to someone the other day — I can’t remember who — about this house and they were like “Ohmigawd Kim, how could you not have registered at the time that your husband bought, like, a $70-fucking-million-dollar house?” And I was just like “Honestly? It’s like…I don’t even know. Like, imagine you went to, like, the store and bought, like, I dunno, one avocado. And even if it’s like, super ripe and delicious and like, literally so effing good, are you then going to pick up the phone and call your wife to tell her about it? Absolutely the fuck NOT! Now get your fucking ass up and get back to work!” Oh! It was my gardener. I was talking to my gardener. One of.”
And it was precisely this inimitable spirit of enterprise and derring-do that Kim had to draw upon when she learned, from the most unlikely of sources, that her ex-husband, facing a liquidity crisis, was looking to sell his beloved Malibu home — at a sizeable discount.
It was, rather poetically, Mr. Ando himself who alerted Kardashian to the home’s pending listing. Over tea one afternoon at Ando’s Osaka atelier, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect broached the subject of Mr. West’s Malibu home while the pair reviewed designs for Kim’s currently-under-construction Palm Springs home — only Mr. Ando’s second residential project in the United States after 24844 Malibu Road. As Kim recalls, Ando was only too eager to draw her attention to the Malibu property and to encourage her to consider placing an offer on the home that he had considered one of his foremost residential masterpieces.
“So we were going over details for the new [Palm Springs] house, and like, both of our assistants were like, totally MIA — fucking typical — so we just had to fumble through with just, like, a few key, like, ‘buzzwords’ or whatever. But like…make-it-effing-work-moment, right??? So anyways, I’m like flipping through random inspo on my phone and holding it up to him like, literally screaming “Travertine! HAI! White Oak! HAI! Lime Wash! HAI! Polished Aluminum! HAI!” And he’s just like, feverishly taking notes and marking up plans and we’re just, like, in the fucking zone in spite of, or honestly maybe because of the language barrier, you know?”
It was then, in the midst of what Kim now characterises as a “literally full-on fucking creative mind meld moment” that Mr. Ando saw fit to broach the subject that had so distressed and preoccupied him in the preceding weeks.
“So like, all of a sudden he got like, super quiet and super serious….” Kim relates, a distinctive note of alarm sounding in her otherwise utterly unmodulated cadence.
“And I was like “he better not be having a fucking heart attack three fucking weeks before we’re supposed to break ground and I’ve already flown out, like, literally a hundred Japanese craftsmen on my own fucking jet. Like I literally had to borrow one of Jeff’s [Bezos] planes to even get over to here for this meeting because Air Kim was like, somewhere over the fucking Pacific full with like, ten carpenters from Okinawa in route [sic] to Palm Springs.”
“Anyways, he was fine, thank fucking God” Kim continues, her inimitable monotone immediately reasserting itself as the flush of anxiety over this fraught episode dissipates. “But still, he’s being like, all weird and quiet and like, literally so random. But eventually he, like, fully pulls me to one side, and I’m like “what the actual eff?” But he just, like, whispers in my ear: “Kimi-San…” ‘cause that’s what he calls me: “Kimi-San.” So cute. Obsessed. Anyways, he’s like “Kimi-San, Kanye-San has brought great shame upon my home in Malibu! Dirt and sand and detritus fill every room! The salt air seeps into the very core of the structure and corrodes it from the inside-out, and the outside-in! Soon the whole house will collapse directly into the sea, and all that will remain is a grotesque — albeit poetically so — pile of rubble! This is a very great dishonour to my name: one I simply cannot bear! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! Please Kimi-San: you must intervene!!!”
“Again, this was like, all in Japanese.” Kim clarifies. “But it was honestly just like vibes, you know?”
Following Mr. Ando’s entreaty, Kim swiftly made arrangements to look in on Malibu property upon her return to California — with six additional Ryukyuan master carpenters in tow aboard Air Kim (as part of Kim’s recently adopted personal sustainability benchmarks, she has committed to operating all Air Kim flights with a minimum forty-percent passenger load, where possible, among numerous other self-defined, self-monitored initiatives.)
Upon visiting the Malibu Road property, just as Mr. Ando had warned, the state of the home was indeed shocking, but sadly, for Kim, all too predictable given what she knew of her ex-husband’s mercurial temperament. The affront was, however, rather more acute for the six carpenters whose innate sense of harmony, grace, and propriety was so profoundly offended by the ravages on display that they resigned on the spot, declaring [the] “avaricious, unscrupulous, and altogether depraved character of America in general and Americans in particularly [is] wholly incompatible with [our] timeless and treasured precepts of what it means to be good, decent, and indeed, human.” Crestfallen at the loss of expertise, Kim reluctantly accepted their resignation, arranged for their return transit to Okinawa (this time aboard a considerably less commodious Business-Class Japan Airlines flight), then turned her focus to unravelling exactly what had transpired at 24844 Malibu Road.
After purchasing the home, Mr. West, in a characteristic fit of pique, had evidently stripped the property of all interior finishes and fittings, alongside the home’s windows and doors (both interior and exterior), and its plumbing and electrical systems, presumably with the intention of renovating the home according to his famously bold taste and fastidious standards. But life had other plans for Mr. West: not one month after the renovation campaign had commenced at Malibu Road, his multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership with Adidas collapsed, and with that, the funds that had been earmarked to underwrite this extremely costly refurbishment scheme evaporated in an instant. With work on the project abruptly halted during the demolition phase, all that remained of Mr. Ando’s one-time architectural masterpiece was its raw concrete mass. Yet even these most basic structural elements had not escaped the ravages of Mr. West’s capricious demolition: many of the interior walls and floor slabs had been at least partially dismantled to make way for Mr. West’s assuredly singular, but sadly here-unrealisable architectonic vision. Those elements that remained intact had been left exposed to the elements and had begun to significantly deteriorate, Ando’s beautiful but extremely fine “smooth as silk” raw concrete finishes being no match for the corrosive effects of the salt-laden coastal clime.
Thankfully Kim, possessed of a keen design acumen, and an experienced architectural patron in her own right, was able to look beyond the current state of the home to envision what it once had been, and perhaps more to the point, what it still could be. At that first and only viewing, she wrote an on-the-spot all-cash offer at the full asking price of $53 million — no contingencies. Concerned that Mr. West’s pride would prevent him from accepting such largesse from her, Kim’s advisors quickly sprung into action, funnelling the purchase through a Russian Doll-esque series of ‘nesting’ shell companies, the end result of which being that her identity as buyer was entirely occluded in the transaction — and as an added, bonus, her nearly $170-million capital gains liability for 2023 entirely zeroed out. The offer was immediately accepted by Mr. West’s listing agents, with no one the wiser that his financial salvation was being delivered by none other than his estranged ex-wife.
“Kanye was having a liquidity crisis, and I was experiencing a liquidity event, and if I’ve learned anything from life — or design — it’s to always strive for balance” Kim explains as she runs a hand appraisingly over the cratered, crumbling expanse of what would have been her primary suite’s western exposure.
And indeed the whole episode does bear some trace of fatedness or inevitability: if not meant to be, exactly, then it’s at least difficult to imagine it being any other way.
Upon taking possession of the home, there remained the not-inconsiderable question of what exactly she would do with home. Certainly, the property was not fit for living in its current state, and a months- or possibly even years-long rehabilitation and renovation campaign simply wasn’t in the cards. Already deep into the design process of the aforementioned Palm Springs residence, Kim was also in the preliminary planning stages for another residence: a lake house in an undisclosed location in Idaho set to be designed by another prolific and award-winning Japanese architect, Kengo Kama. Although she briefly contemplated the possibility of adding a third commission to her slate, the proposition ultimately seemed needlessly stressful, so she swiftly decided against it. What’s more, Kim already owned a different Malibu beachfront home not even half a mile away from the Malibu Road residence that she had purchased in the Autumn of 2022, and even by the profligate standards of her life and real estate portfolio, having two such similar residences in such close proximity to one another struck Kim as an extravagance that she simply could not conscience.
“Once again, I get that it can be, like, so difficult for people to, like, conceptualise, but like, when you get to a certain level, buying like $50-, $60-, even $70-million-dollar homes just becomes like…A Thing To Do, you know?” Kim explains as she gestures absent-mindedly at the charred remains of the home’s original kitchen.
“Boffi — Piero Lissoni” Kim clarifies. “Chic, but a little pedestrian. Honestly, I get why he [Kanye] torched it.”
As she continues to clear errant piles of ash and debris from our path with gentle, idle kicks of her Balenciaga-clad feet, Kim continues her musings on the supreme relativity of all things in life, but most especially and most particularly, wealth.
“The other day, someone else — I can’t remember who — was like “Ohmigawd Kim: you own TWO multi-multi-multi-million-dollar Malibu beachfront homes not even half a mile from each other???” I’m just like “Yeah. I fucking do. And I worked my fucking ass off for it. Let me just ask YOU something: how many pairs of jeans do you own? Just one, right? One single pair of jeans? ‘Cause that’s all you’d EVER need, yeah? Like, once you have one pair, you’re like, ALL GOOD, right? ‘Cause who would ever need more than one of the same-slash-similar thing, right? Right?? Fucking RIGHT??? Yeah. That’s what I fucking thought. Cunt.” Ah! My housekeeper. It was my housekeeper I was talking to. One of. Such a doll. But also such a cunt. Two seemingly opposing things can be true at the same time, you know?”
And indeed, as Kim began to contemplate what to do with and for the most peculiar case of 24844 Malibu Road, two opposing things would prove true: while the house would never be a home for her or her family in the conventional sense, it could still be a home for something she arguably held even dearer: her legacy.
Not that any of this was immediately clear to Kim. Faced with the enormous scale and truly unprecedented particulars of the property, she found herself riven with, even paralysed by a most unfamiliar and uncharacteristic sensation: self-doubt.
“I really had no idea what I was going to do with the house at first…and that was honestly so scary to me. Like, not actually scary-scary, because even if the house sat totally empty for, like, forever, I could use it as a write-off or something, and also leverage it in such a way that principal would actually double roughly every three to five years, I think? I dunno. So like, it was fine, but still scary in a random way, you know?” Kim laments as she wordlessly gestures to her assistant — one of — to dispose of a sizeable nest of Seagull chicks. As the flightless infant birds were tossed over the exposed threshold of the once and former wine cellar to their near-certain deaths on the craggy rocks some 30 metres below, the conversation quite naturally, even inevitably turned once more to questions of resiliency and self-reliance.
“I’ve never been one to rest on my laurels — or my ass. As. I. Keep. Fucking. Saying.” Kim reiterates over the distressed, blood-curdling squawks of the mother gull — swiftly silenced by Kim’s game ranger — one of. “Get off your fucking ass! Get off your fucking ass! Get off your fucking ass! I’m going to keep saying as long as it’s true for me, and fuck everyone who has a problem with that! They know I’m right, and even if I’m not, I’m doubling the fuck down! Because, honestly? It’s twenty-fucking-twenty-four, and it’s like, a new fucking era, and right now, the absolute fiercest fucking thing that anyone can be is just like, shockingly unrepentant about one’s own obscene level of privilege. Like if I tried to sit here and be all, like fake and relatable, everyone would just be like “fuck that bitch.” Honestly, they’re gonna be like “fuck that bitch” no matter what, so I might as well just elevate my complete and total absence of relatability — and fucks — to, like, something almost akin to an art form. Because then at least a few assholes in the chattering classes will be like “this bitch is fucking insane, but like, I kinda respect it as like, some crazy extreme object lesson in whatever the fuck social contagion of the week is burning its way through the pages of the fucking Atlantic.” Kim opines as she gingerly removes the mangled and corroded steel remains of a Charlotte Perriand LC7 chair from our path. “First edition…” she notes, archly. “Can you fucking believe it?”
And indeed, incredulity is precisely the response that many would — and will — have upon hearing Kim, typically so circumspect in her views, speak so candidly and so volubly on such a wide range of controversial topics. But she insists that this version of her — cooly confident, unbound from limiting expectations, unconcerned with the opinions of others — is in fact, the truest expression of her as a person, and her as a brand.
“Like honestly? FUCK IT!” Kim exclaims, the tenor of her voice rising notably: partly to express her righteous outrage, partly to make herself audible as the last remaining load-bearing wall in the dining room gives way with a spectacular, thundering crash. Unphased by the latest destruction, and unperturbed by what, to even the staunchest of atheists, would likely register as some form of karmic smiting, Kim continues her jeremiad against contemporary social mores, with an especial ire reserved for the current state of progressive orthodoxy. “You know what? I am exploiting tax loopholes! I am engaging in questionable labour practices! I will fat shame every close personal relation in my life, including and especially my two daughters and all of my fat nieces if — no, when — they become fucking disgusting to me because that’s what love is! And you wanna know what else, babe? Your culture is my fucking costume! Welcome to Kimmy’s Fucking Dress-Up Corner! Love the boxer braids, BITCH. Obsessed.”
And ultimately, it was precisely this newfound spirit of radical candour and doubling down that helped Kim to arrive at last an answer to the question of what, exactly, to do with 24844 Malibu Road. That, and the sage counsel of an old and trusted friend. One afternoon after yet another fruitless site visit, Kim and her retinue decamped to perennial hotspot Nobu for a late lunch and a much needed creative reset. It was there that Kim had a chance encounter with her friend and frequent collaborator, the acclaimed conceptual artist Marina Abramovic. The pair quickly fell into a spirited exchange about the vexing property just three miles down the road, and Abramovic, intrigued, insisted on touring the home forthright.
“As I looked around, I realised that in spite of the manifest chaos and rage and torment all around me, what I felt was something quite apart from any of that. ”What I felt was Peace. Clarity. Inspiration. Erotic Potency. In short, Kim. Her spirit and her essence suffused every molecule of the house. A strange and glorious and inevitable entanglement inscribed on some quantum plane beyond any understanding.” The home was, for Abramovic, not a home at all, but rather, a “praxis of pure sensation: pure joy; pure love; pure Kim.”
Upon seeing the profound effect of the space on Abramovic, Kim’s formidable creative and entrepreneurial impulses immediately and reflexively began firing on all cylinders. Because she now owned it, the house, Kim suddenly intuited, was not a house at all. It was an artefact. A talisman. An idol. A work of art.
“I think what Marina picked up on, which is, like, so fucking brilliant, is that the weird, like almost shamanic power of fame is, like, actually, literally real” Kim explains as she tours the fecal-strewn expanse of the installation now known as Exigencies (No. 2) (formerly the kitchen).
“Because I, Kim Kardashian, now own this house, it becomes something beyond what it actually is. The act of me, like, acquiring the deed or whatever to this, like, random pile of literal rubble, is like, actually a legit artistic intervention, if you can fucking believe it. And because it’s not an actual house anymore but like, a concept or whatever, its valuation can go through the fucking roof. In the housing market? Functionally, there’s a cap around three-to-four hundred [million]. But in the art market? There are no upper-bound limits on this shit. Like, we’re talking mid-to-high-seven figures at minimum if I play my cards right, or like, die prematurely or whatever.”
Certainly, this artistic and epistemological framework is one that Abramovic herself would heartily co-sign. Writing in her seminal “An Artists Life Manifesto” (2011), Abramovic notes: “An artist creates his own symbols. Symbols are an artist’s language. The language must then be translated. Sometimes it is difficult to find the key. Sometimes it is difficult to find the key. Sometimes it is difficult to find the key.”
And in the case of 24844 Malibu Road (recently re-christened as KKunsthaus Malibu — only the latest branding masterstroke from Ms. Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner), the ‘key’ is indeed difficult to find. But not because it’s hidden, or obscured, or otherwise removed from view. Here, the key is difficult to find simply because there is no key. Everything here is only ever exactly what it seems to be. No more. No less. Just Kim.