Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhonew19 games, 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.

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“We’re standing right now, here,” Mr. Ive said, pointing with his black, Maison Bonnet reading glasses at a two-story, 115-year-old 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.”

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The “huge volume” was a parking lot. Each time Mr. Ive, Apple’s former head of design, looked at the empty stretch of asphalt, he saw something more: a garden, a pavilion, a place where people could socialize outside like they do at his favorite restaurant in London, the River Cafe. So he bought the building next door. And then he bought another and another. Eventually, he owned half of a city block, including the vacant blacktop.

ImageThe Transamerica Pyramid looms over historic Jackson Square in San Francisco.Credit...Carolyn Fong for The New York Times

“This is a very odd thing,” Mr. Ive said, looking up from the model on a morning in late June. “For five years, I haven’t talked to anybody about what we’re doing.”

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