This is the Jackling House exactly how Steve Jobs wanted it since he bought it in 1984, the year of the Macintosh launch: Demolished. Destroyed. Blown to smithereens.
We hired a plane to see the destruction from the air. Here’s the video and photos (excuse the shaky camera, but it was extremely windy, and the aeroplane was moving like crazy).
Even while he lived there for a decade – with little more than a few rugs, lamps, a bed and his Bob Dylan records – he never liked the house. According to him, the Spanish Colonial Revival building was a colossal monster, an architectural abomination. It may have been the Xanadu of copper mining magnate Daniel Cowan Jackling back in 1925, but it was never going to be Citizen Jobs’ ivory tower.
It took him years of legal battling and lobbying to get the permission to destroy the historic building. Finally, the defenders of the copper tycoon’s manor lost, and Steve took his licence-to-kill and obliterated the house in a single day.
At last, Jobs has his dream spot free to build his dream house.
Never look back
Jobs has never been nostalgic. One of the first things he did when he came back to Apple was to get rid of all the classic models that were stored – like in a museum – in a room in their Cupertino campus. He gave them to Stanford, so they could curate them, and freed the room for better, more useful purposes than storing things from the past. According to him, you should always look forward, because whoever looks back in this industry, fails.
That action – just like eliminating the Jackling House from the face of the planet – has been a constant in his career. While the man has shown that he is proud of his life achievements in interviews or his now famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, he doesn’t have any doubts when it’s time to eliminate the past to create the new and realise his vision, no matter if he is right or wrong.
Steve’s Homes
1955 • Steve Jobs is adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who live in a humble home with room for two kids in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
1960 • Jobs family moves to Mountain View. The house had a garage, which Paul used to tinker with cars while Steve started to get interested in electronics.[imgclear]
1969 • Jobs family moves to Los Altos. According to Michael Moritz’s Return to the Little Kingdom, they bought a house “with a gently raked roof, a large garage and three bedrooms” in Los Altos because Steve Jobs wanted to go to a better school, Homestead High School. There, he met Steve Wozniak.
1973 • Steve Jobs goes to Reed College, where he crashes at friends’ dorm rooms and apartments. After dropping out, he keeps going to class, joins Atari, disappears from time to time to a hippie communal farm, and goes on a trip to India.[imgclear]
1982 • Steve buys an apartment in the top two floors of the The San Remo’s north tower, an Neo-Renaissance apartment building in NYC. He renovated his apartment for years with the help of famed architect IM Pei and sold it to U2’s singer Bono in 2003. He never moved there.
1984 • Jobs buys the Jackling House, a 14,540-square-foot, 14-bedroom manor designed by George Washington Smith and located in 460 Mountain Home Road, Woodside, CA 94062. He moves in with almost no furniture.
1991 • Steve Jobs Marries Laurene Powell and moves out of the cooper manor, to a new home on Waverley Street, in Palo Alto, California. This charming, rustic brick house, with big trees and a luscious garden where Jobs cultivates his own vegetables, is his current residence.
