Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhone, Jony Ive leaned over a hulking model of a San Francisco city block. The dozen buildings, with each brick carved to scale in Alder wood, had become a prototype for his future.
“We’re standing right now, here,” Ive said, pointing with his black, Maison Bonnet reading glasses at a two-story, 115-year-old building in Jackson Square, a Gold Rush Era neighbourhood wedged between San Francisco’s Chinatown and Financial District. “We bought this building first, but then we noticed that it had access to this huge volume in the centre.”
The “huge volume” was a parking lot. Each time Ive, Apple’s former head of design, looked at the empty stretch of asphalt, he saw something more: a garden, a pavilion, a place where people could socialise outside like they do at his favourite restaurant in London, the River Cafe. So he bought the building next door. And then he bought another and another. Eventually, he owned half of a city block, including the vacant blacktop.
“This is a very odd thing,” Ive said, looking up from the model on a morning in late June. “For five years, I haven’t talked to anybody about what we’re doing.”
Ive, 57, walked off the world stage in 2019 at the pinnacle of his profession. During his 27 years at Apple, he had conceived the minimalist aesthetic of Apple products. His sleek designs and packaging had influenced everything from the look of televisions to the shape of water bottles. He had become a rare industrial-designer-turned-celebrity who was a co-chair for the Met Gala and helped J J Abrams, the director of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” dream up a new lightsaber.
But after leaving Apple to start his own design firm, which he named LoveFrom, Ive largely disappeared. The firm’s website displayed only its name in a self-made serif font. Its sparseness led people across Silicon Valley to joke that Ive had spent five years designing a typeface. But behind the laughter was the same curiosity: What was Ive up to?
Ive’s city block model offered part of the answer. Over the past four years, the British designer, whose wealth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has quietly accumulated nearly $90 million worth of real estate on a single city block. The purchases began early in the pandemic, at a time when many tech luminaries were fleeing San Francisco. Ive found the exodus noxious.
“I owe the city so much,” said Ive, who moved to San Francisco in the 1990s. “The area had attracted so many people because of its talent, but as soon as things stopped working out, people were leaving.”
He has been turning one of his buildings into a home base for his agency’s work on automotive, fashion and travel products. Another is the headquarters of a new, artificial intelligence (AI) device company that he is developing with OpenAI.
“I don’t know whether it was reckless,” he said of his building buys. “It certainly wasn’t arrogant. It was well intended. But I really felt we could have a contribution.”
At LoveFrom, he has tried to trust his instincts. Buying one building led to buying another. A discussion about a new yarn led to his first fashion apparel. Work with one client, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, led to meeting Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.
It is unclear what the real estate spending spree will amount to, and for all of Mr. Ive’s success, there have been points when his design instincts and expensive tastes went too far. He has been criticized for putting form over function. Some MacBooks were so thin that the keyboards malfunctioned. Some of Apple’s biggest fans mocked the custom gold watch that the company sold for $17,000.
But over two days with him earlier in the summer, it became apparent that he has become more relaxed, even as the range of projects he tackles explodes.
“What I’m learning is to trust, more than ever, my intuition,” Mr. Ive said. “That’s the thing that I’m most excited about.”
From the Infinite Loop to Jackson Square
Mr. Ive was 21 years old when he first visited San Francisco. It was the summer of 1989, and Britain’s Royal Society of Arts had awarded him a travel scholarship for creating a futuristic phone called “the Orator.” He used it to visit Silicon Valley because of its reputation for designing that decade’s most important product: the personal computer.
On that visit, he and his future wife, Heather, fell in love with Jackson Square. Many buildings in the neighborhood had survived the city’s 1906 earthquake and fire because there was a whiskey storehouse in the area. City officials had worried the alcohol would catch on fire, so they protected the neighborhood, even as the rest of the city burned.
Mr. Ive spent hours in the neighborhood at the William Stout Architectural Books store, which had thousands of books about design. Before he left the city, he knew that he wanted to return.
When Apple offered him a job with its design team in 1992, he made San Francisco home. His twin boys, Charlie and Harry, were born there in 2004 and grew up in a $17 million mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
When it came time to find office space for LoveFrom, Mr. Ive returned to Jackson Square because of its creative legacy. It was just a block away from City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe, where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation hung out. It was also home to galleries and artists.
“One of the things that I was fortunate of was to see and understand the context of San Francisco through the eyes of Steve Jobs,” Mr. Ive said. “He knew City Lights and Vesuvio. I owe Steve so much for how I understand San Francisco’s contribution to the culture.”
Mr. Ive named the firm in honor of Mr. Jobs, who told Apple employees in 2007 that one of the ways to express appreciation to humanity is through “the acting of making something with a great deal of care and love.”
In early 2020, Mr. Ive was searching for a permanent office when he learned about a building for sale on Montgomery Street in Jackson Square. He bought it for $8.5 million and discovered its backdoor led to a parking lot encircled by the block’s buildings. He wanted to turn the parking lot into a green space, but learned that he needed to own another building on the block to control the parking lot. So a year later, he bought a neighboring, 33,000-square-foot building for $17 million.
As he was pursuing the property, Mr. Ive had dinner with his friend Wendell Weeks, the chief executive of Corning, the glass company that makes iPhone screens. He talked excitedly about his investments, but Mr. Weeks cringed. San Francisco’s commercial real estate market would crash during the pandemic, and more than a third of its offices remain vacant.
“I don’t really think you need to do that,” Mr. Weeks told Mr. Ive. “I can get you office space.”
But Mr. Ive’s mind was made up. At Apple, he had worked at Infinite Loop, a sterile office park near the interstate, and Apple Park, a futuristic circle of glass and blonde wood. Both campuses were so isolated that they could have existed anywhere. He wanted his new office to be part of the community.
Mr. Ive’s land grab alarmed residents and business owners. Aaron Peskin, a city supervisor now running for mayor, worried that Mr. Ive might demolish iconic buildings and propose a skyscraper.
Those worries faded after neighbors met Mr. Ive. He offered to reduce some tenants’ rents, did free design work for others and won over Mr. Peskin, a frequent critic of development in his district, with his plans to preserve the existing buildings.
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