I couldn’t sleep last night, and it’s because of Drake‘s new house.
Let it be known that I am not a master of interior design. My aesthetic has been charitably described as ‘minimal’, but I’d be more inclined to call it “purgatory, as styled by MUJI.” My life is ensconced in gradients of grey and beige. Besides, I am colour-blind, meaning anything I have to say about “palettes” or “complementary tones” should come with a warning label.
That said, something stirred in me last night when I clocked Architectural Digest’s feature on the rapper’s Toronto mansion.
I was scrolling Instagram as part of my nightly brain-off procedure when I was presented with the magazine’s latest front cover, featuring Drake standing in what I assumed was some sort of converted zeppelin hangar. His fluffy pink coat contrasted the white marble floors, rare wood panelling, and towering brass latticework.
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Dutifully, I followed a link to the full article. I was unable to sleep for another 40 minutes. Now, I must share my burden with you.
Numbers fail to convey the scale of the undertaking, masterminded by interior designer Ferris Rafauli. The figure of 50,000 square feet — that’s 4645 square metres — somehow refuses to convey the fact his mansion holds a “great room”, a two-storey closet, recording studio, swimming pool, and an NBA-sized basketball court.
“It’s overwhelming high luxury,” Drake says in the piece, adding, “I wanted to make sure people can see the work I’ve put in over the years reflected from every vantage point.”
He’s right on that last part. To gaze into his digs is to stare into a kaleidoscope, where every moving facet is a new and numbing expense. The floors? Marble. The bathtub? A single block of marble. Kitchen surfaces? Marble. The bed? That’s not marble, but it might as well be, with Architectural Digest saying it weighs “roughly one ton and cost more than many people’s entire homes”.
The chandeliers are metallic sea urchins. There’s a piano decked out by pop art luminary Takashi Murakami. Drake’s pad features a room dedicated to the basketball jerseys he has collected, and another wing just for the awards he has personally received.
I am not even sure where to start with the light fitting in the “great room”, which the magazine describes as “a foliate ceiling of concentric backlit hexagonal panels wrapped in Alcantara faux suede, with a massive Venini-glass sunburst chandelier dropped from its center.”
The effect of all this is opulence, sure, but some folks have drawn his aesthetic decisions into question.
Every room in Drake’s house looks like he lives in the third best hotel in Qatar https://t.co/MEV9ay6yrO pic.twitter.com/Wr52ALYteA
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 8, 2020
drake’s house kind of looks like a mall so here it is with a dippin’ dots in it pic.twitter.com/j6zaE8mUZM
— Pigeons & Planes (@PigsAndPlans) April 8, 2020
Others have speculated that all critics are jealous of the muso’s ability to throw the GDP of a small island nation at his Birkin bag collection.
“Drake’s house ain’t even all that, he doing too much. You can tell he has no taste, I can do better” pic.twitter.com/tLYLuQDmmF
— Wongo Okon (@whereswongo) April 8, 2020
Watching Drake’s new video clip for Toosie Slide was the last thing I did before going to sleep.
Released a few days before the Architectural Digest feature, the music video features the fella roaming around his house, a conspicuous flex upon folks who can’t afford to cement their legacy through real estate.
Amid the dazzling details, one element stuck with me: Drake has a portrait of Mao Zedong hanging on the wall. The Chinese communist leader was, shall we say, unappreciative of landlords and the owners of private property, and I cannot even begin to fathom what he’d think about Drake’s palace.
Anyway, read the full feature here.
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