Apple design icon Jony Ive buys four Belvedere homes for $73 million
- Tyler Callister
- 32 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Off-market deal includes historic Locksley Hall, now twice Marin’s priciest-ever sale
By TYLER CALLISTER and KEVIN HESSEL
Billionaire designer Jony Ive quietly purchased four Belvedere Island homes for $73 million last month, including the $43.5-million Locksley Hall mansion — itself the largest residential sale in Marin County since the historic home was last sold a decade ago.
Better known locally as the Blanding House, the three-story, 9,235-square-foot home at on Golden Gate Avenue sits atop the city’s southern peak and features sweeping 270-degree views of the San Francisco skyline and Golden Gate and Bay bridges.
The package also included two flanking properties, the $14.62-million Organ House once part of the larger Blanding estate and another Golden Gate Avenue home for $6.9 million, as well as a $7.98-million home below on Beach Road that sits on Belvedere Cove.
Transaction records show all four sales closed Aug. 28.
Ive, best known for his tenure as Apple’s chief product designer, apparently acquired the properties through a privately brokered, off-market transaction from venture capitalist Matt Cohler.
Cohler purchased Locksley Hall for a record-setting $47.5 million in August 2015 under an LLC, then scooped up the others under different LLC’s in June and December 2021. All were linked to Apercen Partners, a Palo Alto-based tax-consulting firm that Federal Elections Commission records show has represented Cohler and other executives and alumni of Facebook and its parent, Meta. After helping to launch LinkedIn, Cohler was one of Facebook’s five original employees and its vice president of product sales. As a venture capitalist, he has backed Dropbox, Instagram and Tinder.
It's unclear what Ive intends to do with the properties.
“Sorry to be so unhelpful, but this would be a ‘decline to comment’ I’m afraid,” his communications chief, Sarah O’Brien, said in a Sept. 24 email.
Ive famously designed the colorful original iMacs and the iPhone, joining Apple in 1992 and becoming the design chief in 2015. After leaving in 2019, he co-founded LoveFrom, a “creative collective” that has worked on industrial design, technology and branding with Ferrari, Airbnb and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
In July, OpenAI completed its $6.4 billion acquisition of Ive’s AI hardware startup, io Products, with Ive and LoveFrom poised to design a line of AI-enabled devices. Before the acquisition announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he had received a prototype device he called “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
Ive also made a large real-estate purchase in San Francisco in 2024, buying the better part of a block in the city’s Jackson Square neighborhood.
While he turned two of the Jackson Square homes into LoveFrom’s headquarters, the Belvedere properties are for residential use only.
Compass agent Bill Smith of Belvedere, who specializes in luxury properties, said Ive’s purchase could attract new attention to the city.
“Belvedere has always had a nice reputation and a name for being this little relaxed, small town, you know, beautiful, friendly and all that,” Smith said. He called it an eye-opener that might spur others to take notice: “‘Oh, gosh, here’s a beautiful community with great views and good weather. It’s a small, safe little village atmosphere.’ Maybe they should take a look at it.”
He suggested Ive will use the adjacent homes as part of a family compound.
The three Golden Gate Avenue properties were bustling with activity Sept. 24, with moving trucks and construction workers moving in and out of homes. One man dressed in a suit who emerged from the main house said he knew nothing about the properties, the sale or the owners and declined further comment.
Architectural masterpiece with romantic origins
The centerpiece of the deal is historic Locksley Hall. Built on 0.94 acres in 1895, the Classic Revival-style structure boasts five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, three powder rooms, a hydraulic elevator, herringbone hardwood oak floors paired with wool carpeting, a grand spiral staircase, cabana and pool house.
It became Belvedere’s first official city landmark in 1993 under the preservation ordinance enacted that year.
To impress a love interest, San Francisco banker C.O. Perry — who became Belvedere’s first treasurer when the city incorporated a year later — built it for $20,000 at a time when the average construction cost was $5,500. He named it for the Alfred Tennyson poem about the yearnings of a rejected suitor, and aptly so, as he remained a bachelor and eventually sold the home and accompanying 30-acre plot in 1904 to San Francisco lawyer Gordon Blanding.
Blanding moved to the mansion full time after the 1906 earthquake destroyed his family’s home in the city. He tore down all the other buildings on the estate except a small home still known as the Gardener’s Cottage on Belvedere Avenue and a small brick cottage immediately adjacent to Locksley Hall.
About 1906, Blanding added a large concert room with a 3,000-pipe Aeolian organ to the brick cottage as part of a remodel by architect Willis Polk. It became known as the Organ House and served as the main entrance to the larger estate, featuring bronze gates he commissioned from emerging architect Julia Morgan, who was finding national renown for her work rebuilding San Francisco and later designed Hearst Castle.
The 7,867-square-foot Organ House, one of Ive’s acquisitions, now features four bedrooms and six bathrooms — though the organ was donated and moved to the Paramount Theatre in Oakland in 1974.
Blanding also commissioned Morgan to design the home below the Organ House, the historic Casino House on Belvedere Avenue built in 1913 for Blanding’s sisters, and John McLaren, the architect of Golden Gate Park, to design the estate’s gardens.
Other homes built under Blanding include the former Carriage House on Belvedere Avenue — a stable and chauffeur’s residence purchased for $4.2 million in 2012 by neighbors Clark and Sharon Winslow, who promptly tore the home down because it was partially blocking their $19 million view — and the Boatman’s House on Blanding Lane for the skipper of his cabin cruiser.
A lower gate on the Locksley Hall gardens helped provide boathouse access with a quarter-mile stroll, but the Beach Road home included in Ive’s acquisition is just steps from the gate.
Overlooking Belvedere Cove and Corinthian Island, that 4,204-square-foot home was built in 1999 and features three bedrooms and 2½ baths, plus a separate 500-square-foot guest unit, with hillside elevators and a 40-foot boat dock.
The smallest of the new Ive properties is adjacent to Locksley Hall on Golden Gate Avenue, a 3,601-square-foot home built in 1948 that contains three bedrooms, 3½ bathrooms.
Century of changing ownership
In 1940, Blanding sold the entire estate to real-estate developer Fred Palmer for $150,000 after the state rejected his offer to donate it as parkland. Through several owners, Locksley Hall slipped into disrepair.
Restoration and redesign plans submitted in 1991 were dashed when then-owner Bernard Raouls Jr., a floor trader and member of the Pacific Stock Exchange, died in 1992 when he crashed his biplane into Drake’s Bay during a stunt session.
As Faithforth Enterprises Inc., Singapore-based copper- and gold-mining magnate and international financier Robert Friedland and his wife, Darlene, purchased Locksley Hall for $5.5 million in 1995. Their team spent 10 years and more than $32 million to revamp the house while maintaining its original styling.
The home didn’t sell when they put it on the market for $65 million in 2007, but it appeared again in late 2014 with a $49 million price tag before Cohler’s record-breaking purchase.
Reach Belvedere, Strawberry and public-safety reporter Tyler Callister at 415-944-4627. Reach Executive Editor Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652.