[5] He visited buildings designed by renowned architects like Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn before returning to Osaka in 1968 to establish his own design studio, Tadao Ando Architects and Associates.

[6] Ando was raised in Japan where the religion and style of life strongly influenced his architecture and design.

Ando's architectural style is said to create a "haiku" effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity.

[9] Due to the simplicity of the exterior, construction, and organization of the space are relatively potential in order to represent the aesthetic of sensation.

The house is famous for the contrast between appearance and spatial organization which allow people to experience the richness of the space within the geometry.

More significantly, Ando's noteworthy engineering achievement in these clustered buildings is site specific—the structures survived undamaged after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.

[17] In 2003, Ando was commissioned by soap opera heir William Bell, Jr. and his wife Maria to design a house for an almost 6-acre (2.4 ha) oceanfront site on the East Pacific Coast Highway in the Paradise Cove area of Malibu, California.

[18][19][20] The house (designed with WHY Architects)[21] is a 40,000-square-foot (3,700 m2) modernist concrete structure in an L shape, with six bedrooms and walls of glass.

[23] Construction completed in 2014, being prolonged due to the oceanfront location, soft soil, and California's extensive building codes.

[19][24] 7,645 cubic yards of unusually high quality concrete were used in the construction of the house, with its rebar specially treated to resist corrosion.

[30] and surpassed California's previous record price for a residence, set by businessman Marc Andreessen in 2021 for the adjacent house.