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