LUXURIATE THE STEVE JOBS WAY

For a man who could call upon almost unearthly amounts of wealth, Jobs famously lived a relatively normal lifestyle. His family home, for instance, was perfectly comfortable but could hardly be described as opulent. And given his taste for denim and turtlenecks, he was not a man who adorned himself with luxurious fabrics.

In the last few months of his life, however, he devoted a good part of his energies towards the design and build of a state-of-the-art yacht. It was an unusually lavish personal project, coming in at somewhere between $130 million and $200 million.

The yacht, named Venus after the goddess of love and beauty, was built in the Feadship shipyard at Aalsmeer in the Netherlands. Feadship, one of the great names in the world of luxury yachts, was the perfect company for the task. Established in the 1920s and with an enviable client list, in the 1990s it built a vessel for one of the other greats of modern technology, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Venus is just over seventy-nine metres in length and has a cutting-edge lightweight aluminium hull. Along its length are a series of frameless three-metre-high windows inspired by the walls of glass familiar from the Apple Stores. The lead designer, though, was legendary French architect Philippe Starck. Work on initial drawings began in 2007, with Jobs and Starck coming together for one day every six weeks to track progress and make refinements. The ethos, inevitably, was one of simplicity and minimalism. Indeed, the finished boat looks as if it has rolled straight out of the Apple workshops. On the yacht’s bridge sit seven twenty-seven-inch iMacs to make sure everything on board runs just as it should.

For Jobs, keeping up work on Venus throughout 2011 became a way for him to defy death for a little longer. Alas, he passed away before he could enjoy relaxing on its uncluttered teak decks, but when the Jobs family unveiled the yacht to the public in October 2012 it cut a fine figure. It is a fitting toy for the man who could have had whatever he wanted but mostly chose not to. As Starck said in an interview with the BBC: ‘Steve and I shared the same idea about the elegance of the minimal, the elegance of work well done.’