"During his 27 years at Apple, he had conceived the minimalist aesthetic of Apple products...."

"Over the past four years, [Jony Ive] 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.... 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.... [H]e 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.... 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."

From "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own/Five years after leaving Apple, the iPhone designer is forging a new life in San Francisco, one imaginative building at a time" (NYT)(free-access link).