‘Celebrities with wrecking balls must be stopped’

Period buildings can be a headache for homeowners trying to get their refurbishments through planning permission, but I have never been more grateful for our stringent preservation rules. Just look at what celebrities are up to across the pond. This past week actor Chris Pratt reportedly demolished a modernist gem of a house in LA to make way for a bigger mansion. Zimmerman House, completed in Brentwood in 1950, was designed by the architect Craig Ellwood aka the California Mies van der Rohe. Pratt appears to have simply been looking for a plot close to his mother-in-law’s house, with seemingly no regard for the 20th-century history pulverised by his wrecking ball. In Malibu, a one-of-a-kind beachfront home by Japanese architect Tadao Ando is rotting in the briny air. Kanye West bought the home in 2021 and promptly gutted it, leaving its concrete shell open to the elements. He put its shell on the market (via Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim) last year for $53 million but has had to slash $14 million off the asking price. Only a handful of Ando buildings exist in the US (Beyoncé has one) and yet there seems to have been such casual disregard for a future classic. Luckily, Londoners have a wealth of glorious mid-century homes and beyond looking for a new lease of life: just cast your eyes to the right for this week’s round-up. And our celebs seem to have more reverence for design history, if the pristine 1930s home of Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder is anything to go by. Yours for £4.5 million — just promise to look after it, yeah?