Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is still out on medical leave, but the demolition of the mansion he reviles in the hamlet of Woodside, Calif., is expected to start soon.
This small town, one of Silicon Valley's wealthiest enclaves, is giving the Apple Inc. executive his long sought-after permit to raze his Spanish Colonial revival mansion, a subject of great debate. Jobs has been seeking to demolish the long-empty 17,000 square-foot house for at least a decade.
"We have been working with Mr. Jobs's representatives for the last few months, and we are very close to the point where the permit will be physically issued at the end of this week or the beginning of next week," Susan George, Woodside's town manager, said last week. The town issued a permit in 2009, but it has been held up as preservationists tried to fight it. Demolition could begin in the next month.
This news is sad for architecture and history buffs, but it may be of interest to investors, or at least Apple fans, who pounce on any tidbits about the company and its co-founder. With Jobs out on medical leave without a specific timetable to return, any word on his future plans are of interest.
"Mr. Jobs has not been intimately involved in the front line of this project," added George. "I know he keeps in very close contact with his representative on this." George also said the executive wants to build a smaller home, which would stand at the end of a private drive on the lush property.
Jobs's lawyer, San Francisco attorney Howard Ellman, said in an email that various offers to buy and restore the house and move it elsewhere were not viable. He declined to comment on any aspects of the situation that are not of public record. In 2004, Woodside gave Jobs conditional approval, with the caveat that he try to find someone willing to rescue and move it.
Before demolition begins, pests have to be eliminated from the property, now in seriously dilapidated condition, thanks to what preservationists say was Jobs's "demolition by neglect." He bought the house in 1983 and lived in it for about 10 years. But it has been mostly empty since then.
The house also has a place in Apple's and Jobs's storied past, but as most Apple fans know, Jobs prefers to look forward rather than backward. He posed with some members of the Macintosh development team on the mansion's grounds in a photo for Newsweek.
The mansion also played a role in the early days of forming NeXT after he was ousted from Apple. Jobs called an impromptu press conference at the house in 1985 to announce his new company, only to be discouraged by PR maven Andy Cunningham, who then had to go and tell the press to leave, as recounted in Alan Deutschman's book "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs."
Preservation Debate
The sprawling stucco manse was built for Daniel Jackling, the last of the copper-mining barons. Woodside's George said that decorative elements and artifacts of historical value are going to be saved from the 1926 house, deemed significant because its architect, George Washington Smith, has been credited by historians as the father of the Spanish Colonial revival movement in California, including signature items such as "the mailbox, the flagpole, the wall tiles, that kind of thing," she commented.
"Wall tiles are being removed by an expert who is going to make them available to museums or other George Washington Smith homes that need them," George elaborated.
Items symbolic of Jackling's source of wealth will also be saved, such as original copper fixtures and light switch plates.
The Jackling House was declared significant both for its architecture and its association with the life of the copper magnate. Timothy LeCain, author of a book on mining called "Mass Destruction," wrote a letter to the Woodside Town Council, pointing out the irony of Jobs's plans.
"That Steven Jobs — a man whose entire career has been built on devices that are essentially useless absent our copper-based electric power grid — proposed to tear down the home of the very man whose own innovations made that electric grid possible, strikes me as a particularly egregious case of ingratitude and amnesia."
In a rare public statement about the house at a Woodside Town Council meeting in 2005, Jobs said he bought the house with the intention of tearing it down, calling it "poorly built."
"It was never really a very interesting house to start with," he told the council. "I think I could build something far, far nicer and far more historically interesting down the road."
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