I can always write an awful lot that I can’t draw,” Jony Ive , the mastermind behind Apple ’s most revolutionary products, says as he holds up a Space Age–style coffee cup. “If I draw this, it only captures certain attributes.”Ive is sitting in the garden of a Pacific Heights carriage house high in the San Francisco hills, a building he converted into a private studio and occasional crash pad for friends. Apart from the cup—devised by Ive’s business partner and fellow designer, Marc Newson, and made by the Japanese brand Noritake—Ive designed nearly every indoor and outdoor element of this deceptively simple space, down to the gray marble bathroom sink and the garden’s round, rough-hewn stepping stones.

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