Jony Ive teams up with Sam Altman for a secret AI device project | Technology News

The “huge volume” was a parking lot. Every time Ive, Apple’s former design director, looked at the empty stretch of asphalt, he saw something else: a garden, a pavilion, a place where people could socialize outdoors as they do at his favorite London restaurant, the River Café. So he bought the building next door. And then he bought another, and another. In the end, he owned half a city block, including the empty asphalt.

“It’s a very strange thing,” Ive said, looking up from the model one morning in late June. “For five years, I haven’t talked to anyone about what we’re doing.”

Ive, 57, left the world stage in 2019 at the top of his game. During his 27 years at Apple, he had conceived the minimalist aesthetic of Apple products. His elegant designs and packaging had influenced everything from the look of televisions to the shape of water bottles. He had become an unlikely industrial designer who became a celebrity, co-chairing the Met Gala and helping 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 called LoveFrom, Ive all but disappeared. The firm’s website featured only his name in a serif font he had made himself. Its scarcity led people in Silicon Valley to joke that Ive had spent five years designing a typeface. But beneath 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 fortune is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has quietly amassed 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 harmful.

“I owe a lot to the city,” said Ive, who moved to San Francisco in the 1990s. “The area had attracted a lot of people because of its talent, but as soon as things stopped working out, people left.”

He has turned one of his buildings into a base for his agency’s work on automotive, fashion and travel products. Another is the headquarters of a new artificial intelligence (AI) device company he is developing with OpenAI.

“I don’t know if it was reckless,” he said of his building purchases. “It certainly wasn’t arrogant. I had good intentions. But I really felt we could make a contribution.”

At LoveFrom, she has tried to trust her instincts. Buying one building led to buying another. A conversation about a new yarn led to creating her first fashion item. Working with a client, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, led her to meet Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

It’s unclear how much the real estate spending spree will amount to, and for all Ive’s success, there have been times when his design instincts and expensive tastes went too far. He has been criticized for putting form before function. Some MacBooks were so thin that the keyboards didn’t work properly. Some of Apple’s biggest fans mocked the custom gold watch the company sold for $17,000.

But after spending two days with him earlier this summer, it became clear that he has become more relaxed, even as the variety of projects he tackles increases exponentially.

“What I’m learning is to trust my intuition more than ever,” Ive said. “That’s what I’m most excited about.”

From the infinite loop to Jackson Square

Ive was 21 when he first visited San Francisco. It was the summer of 1989, and Britain’s Royal Society of Arts had awarded him a travel grant to create a futuristic telephone called the Orator. He used it to visit Silicon Valley because of his reputation for designing the most important product of that decade: 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 earthquake and city fire of 1906 because a whiskey warehouse was located in the area. City officials feared the alcohol would catch fire, so they protected the neighborhood, even as the rest of the city burned.

Mr. Ive spent hours in the neighborhood, at William Stout Architectural Books, which stocked thousands of books on design. Before he left town, he knew he wanted to return.

When Apple offered him a job on its design team in 1992, he settled in San Francisco. His twin sons, Charlie and Harry, were born there in 2004 and grew up in a $17 million mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, with panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When it came time to find office space for LoveFrom, Mr. Ive returned to Jackson Square for its creative legacy. It was just a block from the City Lights bookstore and the Vesuvio Cafe, where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation hung out. It also housed galleries and artists.

“One of the things I was fortunate enough to do was see and understand the context of San Francisco through the eyes of Steve Jobs,” Ive said. “He knew City Lights and Vesuvio. I owe a lot to Steve for understanding San Francisco’s contribution to culture.”

Mr. Ive named the company after Mr. Jobs, who told Apple employees in 2007 that one way to express appreciation for humanity is to “take action by doing something with great care and love.”

In early 2020, Ive was looking for a permanent office when he heard about a building for sale on Montgomery Street in Jackson Square. He bought it for $8.5 million and discovered that his back door led to a parking lot surrounded by the buildings on the block. He wanted to turn the parking lot into green space, but learned he needed to own another building on the block to control parking. So a year later, he bought a neighboring 33,000-square-foot building for $17 million.

While looking for the property, Ive had dinner with his friend Wendell Weeks, the chief executive of Corning, the glass company that makes iPhone screens. He spoke glowingly about his investments, but Weeks shrugged. San Francisco’s commercial real estate market collapsed during the pandemic, and more than a third of its offices remain empty.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Weeks told Ive. “I can get you some office space.”

But Mr. Ive had already made up his mind. At Apple, he had worked at Infinite Loop, a sterile office park near the interstate, and at Apple Park, a futuristic circle of glass and blond wood. Both campuses were so isolated that they could have existed anywhere. He wanted his new office to be part of the community.

Ive’s land grab alarmed residents and business owners. Aaron Peskin, a city supervisor now running for mayor, feared Ive might demolish landmark buildings and propose a skyscraper.

Those concerns were allayed after neighbors met Ive, who offered to reduce rents for some tenants, did free design work for others and won over Peskin, a frequent critic of development in his district, to his plans to preserve existing buildings.