After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own

New York Times. September 21, 2024. – Part 1 of 2.

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,” Mr. 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 neighborhood 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 center.”

The “huge volume” was a parking lot. Each time Mr. 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 socialize outside like they do at his favorite 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,” Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Ive had spent five years designing a typeface. But behind the laughter was the same curiosity: What was Mr. Ive up to

Mr. 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. Mr. Ive found the exodus noxious.

“I owe the city so much,” said Mr. 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.”

Dressed in a white, long-sleeve, hooded T-shirt, stone chinos and Clarks Wallabee shoes, Mr. Ive said he wanted to draw creative types to the edge of downtown. 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 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.”

Wealthy tech executives spending their fortunes on real estate or more imaginative adventures is a staple of Silicon Valley culture. Some buy islands, others build yachts longer than a football field or fund quixotic flying car projects. Mr. Ive’s fixation on a single city block, by comparison, seems modest

But for Mr. Ive, Jackson Square also represents personal reinvention. Few people walk away from their profession’s premier job. Even fewer start over again. A self-professed control freak, Mr. Ive decided that he had fretted enough over the snugness of each iPhone box, the layout of every Apple Watch component and the curve of every iPad corner