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,” Ive said, pointing with his black Maison Bonnet reading glasses at a 115-year-old two-story 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.”