Musician Alicia Keys and her husband, record producer Swizz Beatz, bought one of Southern California’s best-known architectural homes for $20.8 million (£16 million) in 2019. They paid nearly $10 million less than the original asking price before turning the oceanfront property into an art-filled family home. The 11,000-square-foot property was first listed for $30 million, according to Architectural Digest. The couple completed the purchase in late 2019.
Known as the Razor House, the glass-and-concrete estate sits on a cliff in La Jolla, near San Diego, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Two years later, the couple opened the doors of their cliffside home to show how they had turned the unusual building, which extends out over the landscape, into a peaceful retreat filled with art for themselves and their children.
When the estate went into foreclosure and appeared on the market at a lower price in 2019, the couple moved quickly to buy it. Swizz Beatz revealed that he had used a picture of the Razor House as his phone’s screensaver for eight years before buying it.
“It’s a place where you can sit and contemplate, write, and create,” Swizz Beatz told Architectural Digest in the 2021 interview. The main living room, which the family calls the “Dreamland” room, features a custom piano. He described the home as both a place for creative work and a comfortable family retreat. “It was meant to be our place of peace. Keys regularly uses it to compose music while looking out over the Pacific coastline.
He had admired Cunningham’s architecture long before the property came up for sale.