The hand of Jony Ive is all around us: on our desks, in our pockets, in our palms. More than any other living designer, Apple’s former design chief has shaped and contoured our day-to-day experience. Yet unlike the buzzing, attention-hungry iPhone – his most earth-shaking effigy – the man himself is much less forthcoming.

Interview-shy, Ive was never a fixture onstage during the Steve Jobs-era product launches. He often worried as a young designer in England that his chronic fear of public speaking would keep him from a career. Nevertheless, Ive spent 27 years drawing up the first iterations of everything from tablets to smartwatches. He changed the world – then fell off the radar. “When I left Apple, six years ago, I had the overwhelming conviction that my most important and useful work lay ahead of me,” says Ive, in his hesitant Essex accent that has persisted despite four decades of living and working in the US. “I just didn’t know yet what it was.”

The work, says Ive, is now starting to take shape. Monocle meets the designer in a bright white room in the Jackson Square neighbourhood on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District. Through large windows that frame a blue sky, light pours onto an intricate wooden model of a single city block. We’re standing in a building halfway down Montgomery Street in a space that Lovefrom, the studio he founded in 2019 and which counts Australian designer Marc Newson as a collaborator, bought as the pandemic was dawning. Since then, Ive has been snapping up a vast chunk of real estate across downtown reckoned to be worth more than $100m (€88m) and equating to half a city block. It includes multiple offices, private residences and a fly-fishing shop called Lost Coast Outfitters. “I now have the guy whose name is on the patent for the aluminium MacBook coming in here, buying flies,” says owner George Revel, who speaks highly of his new landlord. 

The scale of acquisitions would be remarkable anywhere. But San Francisco has been brought to its knees in recent years. During the pandemic, many of the big-hitting tech businesses that have brought the city wealth and unparalleled productivity over the past two decades went remote and never returned. This left the urban core decayed, with boarded-up boutiques and streets devoid of workers or a reason for being. The Financial District, which buttresses Jackson Square, was hit hardest, with office vacancies soaring to 35 per cent; with that came an epidemic of homelessness, crime and drugs. “It hurts profoundly to see a person or an entity that you love suffering,” says Ive. “And I had benefitted from and learnt so much from San Francisco in my life.” 

By basing his growing business in the neighbourhood, he says he can contribute to the city revival and get people working in the downtown again. 

On the wooden model, thinly etched lines delineate the elegant façades of historic 19th-century buildings, which are currently being restored with the studio’s oversight. Such renovations are regarded as giving back to the neighbourhood. Attention has turned to the forlorn car park in the centre, with a construction team hard at work digging up the asphalt to create a landscaped area that Ive calls the Pavilion, where the Lovefrom team can gather for lunch and host friends from the area. “I’ve just always loved walled gardens,” says Ive, as we peer into the quadrangle at the centre of the model. The neighbourhood resounds with hammers, diggers and the clamour of industry again. But what is it all for? “At its most pedestrian, it is a tool to support our practice,” says Ive, as we walk between high-ceilinged rooms. So far, Lovefrom has worked on a string of prestigious if whimsical commissions: the seal for King Charles III’s coronation; a line of jackets for Moncler; the fitout for an all electric Ferrari. The 60-strong studio, which is currently housed in a bare-brick building on Montgomery Street, counts several A-team hires from the Jobs-era of Apple among its roster. A steep staircase in the centre of the room that leads to the studio is off-limits to all but true insiders. 

“Upstairs are the most remarkable industrial designers in the world,” says Ive. “The most remarkable user-interface designers, graphic designers, typographers, engineers and, my God,” he says, visibly moved at the thought, “I get to walk up those stairs every day.” As the team expands, Ive explains, they will move into one of the newly restored spaces over the next summer.

Yet the ambition here goes well beyond coats, cars and even city blocks. In 2023, it was reported that Ive had begun talking to Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI and developer of the ChatGPT large language model, which has become the poster-child firm for artificial intelligence and how it will supposedly remake the world. Reports suggest that they are collaborating on a phone-like device; something less disruptive to our social ways than a smartphone; something, even, without a screen. On all of this, Lovefrom declines to comment. Despite the paucity of detail, tech watchers describe this meeting of minds as a formidable and potentially highly disruptive force. Ive has reinvented the way we communicate before. Could he be about to do it again? From the outset, Ive and his team are clear that he will not be drawn on the AI work. On May 21, Lovefrom announced that the team behind it would be merging with OpenAI, with Ive taking on design and creative responsibilities across both OpenAI and the project, called io, “focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable.”

Secrecy was a hallmark of Jobs-era Apple and, at Lovefrom HQ, this mysterious AI project has all the mystique and air of importance of the space programme. Ive clearly believes that he and the team are onto something big. At one point, we are taken to Ernie’s, a fully-staffed in-house medical centre dedicated to keeping Lovefrom employees tip-top and at their wellbeing best. (Naturally it has rather exquisite branding). Named after a restaurant that once stood on the site and was apparently a favourite of Alfred Hitchcock, Ernie’s illustrates the scale of ambition behind Lovefrom’s dignified façade. “If you’re dealing in fragile concepts, the working environment has to be characterised by trust and care,” says Ive, who then quotes Freud. “‘Love and work, work and love; that’s all there is.’” What comes across on the day that Monocle spends with Lovefrom, is a sense of mission – alluded to but never stated – to create a different kind of founder-led business than the sort San Francisco has become associated with. That’s not just about wellness check-ins but also about how the business interacts with the city around it; how to be disruptive without being destructive.

It may well sound high-minded and unmistakably West Coast in tone but powerful people are breezing through these brick hallways, whether that’s Laurene Powell Jobs, the philanthropist widow of the late Steve, or cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who recently put on a private concert for the staff, the neighbourhood and a few high-profile friends. Officious men in black coats and earpieces are often seen waiting in front of the Lovefrom building. Those out of the loop of Ive’s plans walk past and wonder, what is he building in there?

All this brings a sense of momentum to an area that, just two years ago, was bereft. At Postscript, an elegant market and café that opened across the road from Lovefrom in late 2023, there’s a buzz among the outdoor tables. “Well, you know Jony’s just signed for another one,” says a woman, holding court over coffee with a well-heeled-looking group of out-of-towners.

Around the corner, a vast new Paul Smith boutique has just opened and there are more shops, cafés and studios moving in. Back in January, Ghazi Shami, the CEO and founder of record label Empire Distribution, purchased the historic One Montgomery building for $24.5m (€21.5m), saying that he intends to create his headquarters and restaurants inside, while the Transamerica Pyramid, following a restoration by Foster and Partners that was completed in 2024, is attracting big-office clients back to the centre. According to Bloomberg, real-estate developers Brick & Timber Collective are planning $500m of investment and restoration all around Jackson Square. 

Ive, of course, isn’t solely responsible for this; the city is poised for another tech boom as an AI gold rush smoulders with possibility. All over San Francisco, AI start-ups stare down from the billboards. But Lovefrom’s investments were a bold act of belief in the city when the chips were down.

He is keen to make it clear that this shouldn’t be seen as property development. “There’s no fiscal benefit for us in investing in these buildings; these aren’t a means to an end, if that end is generating revenue,” says Ive. “There are also much more cost-effective ways of providing space for the design team. The reason we’re investing in these buildings is because we really love this neighbourhood and believe that it deserves investment.” Jackson Square was where the designer first landed in the US in 1989, on a bursary after his graduation from Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). The first shop he visited on US Shores was William Stout Architectural Books, which sits across the road from Lovefrom’s new office on the street where he vowed to one day have a studio, almost 40 years ago. 

The bookshop was recently acquired by the Eames Institute, which administers the legacy of California designers Ray and Charles Eames, with the view to preserve and safeguard this long-standing architectural resource for the future, especially as San Francisco’s downtown kicks back into gear.

“The customers walking through the door have been getting younger over the past six months,” says Erik Heywood, retail director for the Eames Institute and William Stout. “That doesn’t always happen with a 50-year-old business.” Lauren Smith, the chief experience officer for Eames, agrees that there is a new energy downtown, heralded by the arrival of Lovefrom. “It feels like we’re on the brink of something.” Continuing the idea of giving back to the neighbourhood that it now calls home, Lovefrom is refreshing Stout’s branding (gratis, of course) and has done the same with the menus at Quince, a much-lauded restaurant and Ive favourite. “Jony and I share the opinion that we have to be stewards of the neighbourhood,” says co-founder Lindsay Tusk, who planted a flag in Jackson Square in 2003 and now has multiple restaurants dotted around the area. “There is a lot of curiosity about what Jony is working on; it’s attracting a group of highly creative individuals and people want to be around that.”Jackson Square itself could be described as the guts of San Francisco. The neighbourhood was founded in 1849 amid the first big gold rush, an era when the genteel Italianate buildings served as the nucleus of the so-called Barbary Coast, a red-light district that catered to sailors and prospectors seeking somewhere to splash their lucre. Under the asphalt, holding up the futurist struts of the Transamerica Pyramid, are the compacted remains of tall ships whose owners sailed to the New World in search of fortune and then abandoned their galleons when they got there. What is now the Financial District was built on this reclaimed land, and on Hotaling Street, the oldest lane in the city, there are wavy marks etched into the pavement showing where the tide once rose to.

Those beginnings set the mould for San Francisco’s boom-and-bust rhythm. It has always been a place where fortunes are made and lost, and the city is often left picking up the pieces once the gold runs out. 

Prior to the crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, the dotcom bubble of the 1990s was the most recent modern equivalent. Long-time residents, who have seen high- rolling days before say that the energy coursing through San Francisco right now around artificial intelligence has the whiff of exactly one of those upswing moments.

Ive remained at Apple for several years after Jobs’ death in 2011 and watched the behemoth balloon into a company that was very different from its beginnings. On its route to becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company, Apple has cranked out products including augmented-reality headsets and a personal-trainer service; it became a
platform for and producer of films and released new iterations of the iPhone every year. Some of those who came up through Apple say that it lost something along the way – perhaps the focus that its co-founder once extolled as a driving virtue. It went from being a maker of products intended to simplify one’s life to, quite simply, another tech company, albeit the world’s biggest.

San Francisco changed in tandem. The barefoot, Buddhist founders of the dotcom days were slowly replaced by a new generation of bolshier entrepreneurs. Birkenstocks were out; gilets were in. The modern city was never a cheap place to be but, in about 2011, it went into overdrive as rents and salaries climbed precipitously high and many longstanding residents were priced out. The social fabric frayed as a homelessness crisis went unchecked, compounded by the rise of fentanyl and a leniency towards drugs coupled with profound inequality.

Still, the mass flight of businesses in 2020 irks Ive. “I don’t like fair-weather friends,” he says. “Those people who just consume and declare themselves a friend and [then leave] as soon as it gets inconvenient or challenging.” The whims of the technology industry, however, are only partly to blame for what happened to San Francisco. The authorities are still trying to get a handle on the open-air drug markets that were left to proliferate downtown. Meanwhile, parts of Union Square are still beset by social problems, even as things are improving. But as one long-standing resident of Jackson Square sees it: “What nobody wants to say in this progressive place is that, basically, the city finally got tough.” Many still need to be convinced that San Francisco is changing. 

New mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi’s fortune who takes a dollar a year from city hall, immediately set to work cracking down on crime in the city centre upon his appointment in January – and the data suggests that his efforts are working. But he has his work cut out for him. “I’m calling companies around this country and saying, ‘What can we do to get you back here?’” Lurie tells Monocle, in a month that saw the Bay Area-based property firm Realtor.com announce it was moving to Texas. “I am laser-focused on making sure that we bring [big] business back, which will help our small businesses too. But I want those companies to be part of the community.” 

Lurie references what Ive is doing in Jackson Square as an example of how this can be done. But what if this old gold-rush town booms and busts again – if the AI bubble bursts and businesses head for the hills? “There’s no better place to do business,” he says. “When you come here, you need to be involved. But we saw what happened when businesses fled and we, at times, took that for granted here. That will no longer be the case.”

Over the years, plenty of ink has been spilled about the death of San Francisco – some of it fair, some of it less so. “There was a tendency to overstate the issues – but there were problems and real suffering,” says Ive. “My goal isn’t to shift the narrative, though. My goal is to help shift the city.”