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

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. He wanted something new.

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.

“I’ve seen many iterations and reincarnations of this area, but it’s always maintained a diverse business typology,” he said. “He respects that.”

An Elegant History of Buttons

From a bench at a long wooden table inside the LoveFrom studio on that morning in late June, Mr. Ive flipped through images of his firm’s work. There was a coronation emblem for King Charles III, a jacket for the Italian luxury brand Moncler and an interior touch-screen for the first electric Ferrari.

The three-story studio was a blend of Mr. Ive’s past and present. Exposed brick walls framed a long table for design discussions — much as he had at Apple. Waist-high tables nearby, similar to those at an Apple Store, displayed finished work. And shelves along the walls displayed white coffee table books about design research.

“This is my button book,” Mr. Ive said, as he flipped open one of the oversized books titled “Garment Fasteners Design Research.” Its pages were filled with images of fasteners and pins from prehistory through the Bronze Age. It was the first of a custom-printed, five-volume series of books with pictures and analysis of mankind’s entire history of making buttons for clothing. “Five years we’ve been working on this, and we absolutely love it.”

When Mr. Ive first considered leaving Apple, he turned to his friend Marc Newson for advice. The Australian-born industrial designer, who joined Apple in 2014 to work on the Apple Watch, had spent his career at an independent design firm with work that ranged from luxury yachts and surfboards to Louis Vuitton luggage and vibrators. Mr. Newson suggested that they start a creative collective to work on projects.

Recalling those early conversations, Mr. Newson said the goal was to leave behind the grind and rigor of Apple. “The freedom was the idea,” Mr. Newson said.

Over five years, Mr. Ive and Mr. Newson hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer who work across three areas: work for the love of it, which they do without pay; work for clients, which includes Airbnb and Ferrari; and work for themselves, which includes the building renovation.

Mr. Ive’s “button book” is emblematic of the firm’s approach. During a conversation in 2019 with Remo Ruffini, the chief executive of Moncler, Mr. Ive learned that the jacket maker was uncertain how to use a new yarn made of recycled nylon. Mr. Ive proposed creating a jacket cut from a single piece of cloth with no seams.

The resulting coat is a blanket of goose down that can be zipped together to create two sleeves. It slips inside the shell of a poncho, parka or a field jacket and is held in place by custom, magnetic buttons that snap together with a click like an AirPods case. The buttons are etched with LoveFrom’s mascot: a brown bear inspired by California’s state flag.

The jacket will be released this fall as a special edition item. It will cost more than $2,000.

The Moncler project was something Mr. Ive collaborated on because he wanted to design his first garment. It fit into his belief that the firm should do some work that he says is for “the love of others” and some that is for the “love of us.”

The firm’s largest “for us” project is the Jackson Square redevelopment. On a 114-inch TV near the studio’s entrance, Mr. Ive showed an artist’s rendering of the parking lot as a garden. Pebbled pathways cut between green grass. Hedges created a perimeter of greenery along the walls of the surrounding buildings and trees provided shade for outdoor chairs. A pavilion stood in the center for meetings and events.

The firm’s studio will fill two buildings between the courtyard and street. Because of a zoning requirement, one of the buildings will have a LoveFrom store where the firm will sell products like its custom notebooks and Moncler jackets.

He and Mr. Newson hope the renovation, which is scheduled for completion in late 2025, draws others to the area. Several firms have already followed, including Emerson Collective, which was founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm with ties to OpenAI.

“There’s a counterintuitive opportunity to prove people wrong” about San Francisco,Mr. Newson said.

Ferrari Screens and A.I. Devices

As Mr. Ive climbed a wooden staircase to the studio’s second floor that morning, he spoke about LoveFrom’s clients, which pay the firm as much as $200 million annually. The two dozen designers upstairs were working on an array of projects, including a Christie’s auction stand, Airbnb graphics and a Ferrari interior.

John Elkann, the chief executive of Exor and a member of the Agnelli family, which owns Ferrari, was one of LoveFrom’s first clients. Mr. Elkann tapped the firm because he admired how Mr. Ive’s Apple Watch had turned an analog device into a digital product. He wanted the same touch on Ferrari’s first electric vehicle.

The project has given Mr. Elkann an appreciation for LoveFrom’s process. In January, he visited the firm’s studio for an hourslong meeting about the car’s steering wheel. He listened as Mr. Ive and others talked about the appropriate steering wheel length and how a driver should hold it. Ferrari’s chief test driver tested an early prototype of the wheel, which borrowed design elements from the company’s sports car and racecar history, to assess how it would perform.

“Paying attention to the steering wheel in a car that you want to drive and what the physicality of what that means is something that Jony was very clear about,” Mr. Elkann said. He added that the result is “something really, really different.”

Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, was another early client. LoveFrom helped redesign the travel company’s review system, introduce three-dimensional icons to its app and develop a concept, called “travel postcards,” which led to the company’s introduction of Icons, destination properties including a replica of the X-Men mansion that people can rent.

Mr. Chesky is a close friend of Mr. Altman, whose company OpenAI has been at the forefront of building generative artificial intelligence. Last year, Mr. Chesky arranged for Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman to meet for dinner.

At a Michelin-starred restaurant, Spruce, a few miles from Jackson Square, Mr. Altman and Mr. Ive talked about how generative A.I. made it possible to create a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software since it could summarize and prioritize messages, identify and name objects like plants and eventually field complex requests like booking travel.

Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors.

In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.

On a Friday morning in late June, Mr. Tan and Ms. Hankey could be seen wheeling chairs between the Little Fox Theater and the nearby LoveFrom studio. The chairs were topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.

The project is being developed in secret. Mr. Newson said that what the product would be and when it would be released were still being determined.

Though Mr. Ive is optimistic about their work and enthusiastic that it could make his investments in Jackson Square worthwhile, he is uneasy about the future. It is only natural for him to be afraid that he spent too much money on property or worry that his start-up could fail.

But seated on a plush, cream couch near LoveFrom’s model of Jackson Square, he said that his philosophy was not to let success be determined by a number. Judging a real estate purchase or a new device by its return on investment would miss the point. Life’s most important decisions require leaps into the unknown.

“You somehow have to make friends with uncertainty,” he said. It was a very un-Apple-like view of the world.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.