Kanye & Kim

He Said, She Said

- Laura Brown

KIM KARDASHIAN WEST AND KANYE WEST’S house sits atop a steep driveway in a gated community in Los Angeles’s Bel Air neighbourhood. Kanye, on the phone, is pacing in front of the house, occasionally obscured by a column or a shiny silver sports car. He waves me in with a publicly infrequent smile and apologises for his workout gear: Miami Heat shorts and a black T-shirt.

This is not really their house, though. This is a stage home where the family—West, Kardashian, and their children, North, three, and Saint, nine months—are camping (a term used loosely; the place is majestically minimal) for the next few weeks until their new home is finally ready. Prior to this, they’d spent more than a year at the Calabasas home of Kim’s mother, Kris Jenner.

Kim click-clacks in, wearing a long, khaki Lycra dress—“a Yeezy sample”—and full, precise makeup. Kanye perches on a coffee table between two gigantic white couches. On the table are some art books: Annie Leibovitz, the architect Álvaro Siza, and oddly, one titled Great Stud-Farms of the World. “Huh?” Kanye says when I ask if, for any reason, he’s in to stud farms. “Nah, that’s not our book. That’s for staging.”

And when it comes to staging, Kim and Kanye know a thing or two:

Kanye West: I think we should get an outdoor shower.

Kim Kardashian West: Well, outside would be freezing, so maybe one inside and one outside. One and one.

KW: But there’s a way that you can open the glass, like a sunroof. I’m thinking about the plaster too, around the bathtub.

KKW: We’ll discuss.