The spaces within Kanye West’s Yeezy Studio in Calabasas by designer Willo Perron are as one might expect: austere, moody, enigmatic.
The 14,390-square-foot adaptive reuse project, first reported in an exclusive at PIN-UP magazine, is housed within one of the ubiquitous raw concrete suburban office parks located in Calabasas, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Designed by longtime West collaborator Perron, the equal-parts rough and minimal office spaces contain a mix of production facilities for West’s Yeezy-brand clothing line, a recording studio, and meeting spaces, among other uses. Perron has worked with West for over a dozen years on a variety of design projects, including concert stage designs, album covers, and fashion shows, and has a long resume loaded with collaborative design projects for other musicians and celebrities, including Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Florence and the Machine, and Tame Impala.
Included in the facilities are a room lined with black-painted wooden shelves that extend seamlessly into a glass-enclosed meeting room. The shelves are supplemented by chunky wooden tables that can be found throughout the premises. The black plywood and MDF tables show up again in a meeting room, where they compliment collections of cast concrete benches inspired by steel highway supports, and in a conference area and lounge, where the benches work as coffee tables for an oversized, 30-foot-long off-white sofa. The large room is bisected by a pair of columns, grounded by polished concrete floors, and is populated by three sets of worktables and eight all-black display boards.
The multi-monochromatic spaces echo West’s collaborations with Axel Vervoordt for the rapper’s nearby home in Hidden Hills and speak to an interest on the part of West to mix and match visual modes. This sensibility, always present in West’s music, is also on display in the various Yeezy clothing lines, which blend a sort of dystopic thrift store aesthetic with riffs on high-end, ready-to-wear, and throw-back fashions.
Perron told PIN-UP that the facilities were “the very beginning of the utopia,” nodding not just to West’s totalizing aesthetics but also to the artist’s ongoing interest in architectural design.
West recently announced the intention to start up a so-called “Yeezy Home” arm of his eponymous creative studio. The endeavor will aim to include architectural and urban design in West’s growing collaborative art practice, which already includes music, film, fashion, and performance art initiatives.
