Steve Jobs

solarium, with the snow coming down hard and Glacier Point just visible in the distance. It was conducted by Jobs’s longtime Sōtō Zen teacher, Kobun Chino, who shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted in a mumbling manner that most guests found incomprehensible. “I thought he was drunk,” said Tevanian. He wasn’t. The wedding cake was in the shape of Half Dome, the granite crest at the end of Yosemite Valley, but since it was strictly vegan—devoid of eggs, milk, or any refined products—more than a few of the guests found it inedible. Afterward they all went hiking, and Powell’s three strapping brothers launched a snowball fight, with lots of tackling and roughhousing. “You see, Mona,” Jobs said to his sister, “Laurene is descended from Joe Namath and we’re descended from John Muir.”
    A Family Home
    Powell shared her husband’s interest in natural foods. While at business school, she had worked part time at Odwalla, the juice company, where she helped develop the first marketing plan. After marrying Jobs, she felt that it was important to have a career, having learned from her childhood the need to be self-sufficient. So she started her own company, Terravera, that made ready-to-eat organic meals and delivered them to stores throughout northern California.
    Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnishedWoodside mansion, the couple moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary venture capitalist John Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from view. Instead, houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets flanked by wide sidewalks. “We wanted to live in a neighborhood where kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.
    The house was not the minimalist and modernist style Jobs would have designed if he had built a home from scratch. Nor was it a large or distinctive mansion that would make people stop and take notice as they drove down his street in Palo Alto. It was built in the 1930s by a local designer named Carr Jones, who specialized in carefully crafted homes in the “storybook style” of English or French country cottages.
    The two-story house was made of red brick, with exposed wood beams and a shingle roof with curved lines; it evoked a rambling Cotswold cottage, or perhaps a home where a well-to-do Hobbit might have lived. The one Californian touch was a mission-style courtyard framed by the wings of the house. The two-story vaulted-ceiling living room was informal, with a floor of tile and terra-cotta. At one end was a large triangular window leading up to the peak of the ceiling; it had stained glass when Jobs bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he replaced it with clear glass. The other renovation he and Powell made was to expand the kitchen to include a wood-burning pizza oven and room for a long wooden table that would become the family’s primary gathering place. It was supposed to be a four-month renovation, but it took sixteen months because Jobs kept redoing the design. They also bought the small house behind them and razed it to make a backyard, which Powell turned into a beautiful natural garden filled with a profusion of seasonal flowers along with vegetables and herbs.
    Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden GateBridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas came from reading books in the library and
Architectural Digest
.”
    Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare essentials: a chest of drawers and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding chairs in what would have been a dining room. He wanted around him only things that he could admire, and that made it hard simply to go out and buy a