Apple CEO Steve Jobs “hasn’t been able to do is convince preservationists that his plan to demolish a California house would improve the neighborhood,” Bloomberg News reports. “At stake is a 17,250-square-foot (1,550-square-meter) mansion set on six acres in the small town of Woodside, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of San Francisco. Preservationists call it a prized example of Spanish Colonial Revival style.”
Bloomberg News reports, “Jobs says he never liked the 30-room Jackling House, which he bought 21 years ago. He wants to tear it down so he can build a smaller one, which he told Woodside would be designed better and possibly merit historic status itself some day. ‘You may not think it is of historic significance, Mr. Jobs, but it is,’ said Frank Sanchis, former vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Trust for Historic Preservation. ‘Communities have a quality that is given to them by the architecture that is represented there, and if you remove it, it chips away at architecture in America and in the end communities become more generic.'”
“A group of preservationists called Uphold Our Heritage successfully sued to kill Jobs’s demolition permit for the Jackling House, which is named after its original owner, copper magnate Daniel C. Jackling. Sanchis is advising the group, which questioned whether Jobs tried hard enough to save the house, including his one-year effort to give it away. Jobs is in the process of filing an appeal to challenge the Jan. 26 order revoking his permit, his attorney Howard Ellman said last week. Jobs declined requests for an interview,” Bloomberg News reports. Jobs “has described the home as an ‘abomination’ in meetings with Woodside officials and said he could design something ‘far nicer,’ according to a local newspaper, the Alamanac. Preservationists accuse him of willfully neglecting the place, allowing it to be exposed to the elements for several years with doors and windows missing. No one has lived in the house for six years, and it has become dilapidated, said Ellman, of San Francisco-based Ellman, Burke, Hoffman & Johnson. Jobs’s plan is to tear it down, combine the property with a six-acre site next door, and build a home as big as 6,000 square feet for his wife and three children. ‘He’s made it clear he intends to continue to be patient,’ Ellman said of Jobs’s decision to appeal the ruling by San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Marie Weiner.”
Full article here.
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Related articles:
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Perhaps Steve would run into less trouble if he planned to build a McDonald’s House for kids.
whats the betting he wants to build a Cube shaped house lol
Frank Sanchis should get his nose out Steve’s business. Show me what he’s done to help the neighborhood.
Steve–get some termites.
Any have pictures of this house? dyng to see it.
LET STEVE BUILD THE GONE DAMN HOUSE!!!
then we’ll compare jobs’s work of art to the 2-bit nerd factory that gates lives in.
MWAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!
oh i’m sorry. i was looking for the mac news section. i’m in the wrong place.
It’s rather humorous to see liberals fighting amongst themselves like this. But seeing as how Steve Jobs is now a very rich liberal, many of them see him as the enemy now.
Hmm, looks a fairly indifferent neo-Spanish to me.
What’s missing in the argument is what’s proposed to replace it.
What about something big and white and round, with a chunk out of one side…
Here’s a pic from the inside:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2004/07/24/HOGNQ7QCOH1.DTL&o=0
LRL.
Wherever do you get the impression that preservationists are liberals?
If Steve could afford the Mona Lisa, it’s his right to burn it! What you BUY gives you the RIGHT to say what’s historical or artistic and what is not.
American heritage is unamerican! Die liberal commies! Stop picking on poor rich guys!
Steve could build a much better house! But how could he EVER afford the land to build it someplace ELSE?
If it’s “liberal” to sometimes… just occasionally… NOT bend over for the wealthy, then I’m glad there are so many liberals.
And we thought the sheep were all on the Windows side of the fence
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This is how Democrats Become Republicans. Some idiot on the (b)east coast wants to ‘preserve’ your personal property, tell you what you can do with it, etc. It’s your property, but some outsider wants o control you and it. This is liberalism run wild. If the preservationists are so sold on the house they should have taken Steve Jobs up on his offer to give it to anyone who would move it.
This is not a public building on 5th Avenue or the Sistine Chapel– it’s an old robber baron era house on a private street. What advantage could possibly be served by this kind of sh*t? Save us from people like this.
Hmmmm. A house on 12 acres in a small town. I do not think anyone will really notice one house from the other. If we were talking the middle of down town, that is one thing, but on 12 acres, the house is not exactly in the middle of things. ( I am assuming that other houses in the area also have large lots and are spread out too.
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Time for a fire…..
This isn’t really a liberal/conservative issue. How people categorize “historic” and whether they believe that is worthy of preservation cut across political beliefs. Even the example used by “liberals gone wild” is off base. Yes, conservatives have typically championed personal property rights, but they also believe the government can tell people how they can have sex on that that personal property. But let us not forget that the current GOP administration has supported the idea that a city can claim eminent domain in cases where siezing the property and developing it would help the local economy (eg a case in NJ). This is hardly worth turning into a liberals/conservatives debate. Ridiculous.
I was interested in pictures, too. Plenty on google images.
The question is, was it considered an “historical building” when he purchased it? If yes, then perhaps the heritage society folks have a case, but if not, they need to mind their own business. If it was that important to them, they could either purchased it themselves when Steve bought it, or they could have found a way to raise the money to move it. If he owns, and it wasn’t considered historical when he bought it, he should be free to do whatever he wants with it.
reminds me of the “hill valley preservation society”
remember they wanted to preserve the clock tower just the way it was when it was struck by lightning in 1955??
well, marty donated a quarter and got a flyer. if he hadn’t done that, then he wouldn’t have been able to come back to 1958 from 1955.
in short, preservation is good. we need look no further than historical movies.
1985 from 1955…
If Steve was a Republican he could get the house demolished under ‘Eminent Domain’, then the new home would give the local government more taxes. If he’s owned the old place for all those years—the taxes are probably lower than the taxes on a new, smaller home would be.
There is nothing wrong with demolishing your property if you wish to rebuild it better. What is wrong with America when people buy things, but don’t actually have the right to do as they wish with them, oh I guess that’s the whole concept of DRM.
On second thought, maybe it is fair. If I can’t buy iTunes music and listen to it on my iRiver mp3 player then why should Steve Jobs be able to tear down a house he owns. I love my PowerBook, but why can’t I legally dual boot Windows when I’m at work and then run OSX when I get home? I have dual boot Linux and Windows at my old office, why should everyone be locked into things even though they own them but still have limited rights to use them?
Reality is so much stranger than fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple products and I think SJ is cool, but maybe he is just tasting a bit of his own medicine.
If they want to preserve the house so badly, why didn’t someone take it when he was trying to give it away?
Yeah, I guess this is a case of DRM – Demolition Rights Management.
Weather it’s Jobs or not, this is crazy.
Ok, you have three people in a room – A Terrorist, A Mass-Murderer and a Lawyer. You have a gun with only 2 bullets in it. What do you do?
Shoot the Lawyer TWICE!
Historical preservation…in California?!
Let me get this straight: who cares about the American Indians’ home, we want to preserve some rinky dink Eurowannabe house that some rich monkey threw his money away on for the purposes of “art”.
How about building a new house, with even better Eurotrash architecture, and preserve that? Now that’s what I call art!
ps.
He should have some fun and hire that architect from “Beetle Juice” (1989)
Now that’s historic California architecture!!
The last time I checked, the idea of ownership was pretty well established. One important concept was that unless any changes you made endangered the public at large (fire codes, drainage, etc) what you did with your property was your business.
All Steve has to do is take an XBOX over there and play away. Eventually it will you-know-what and his problem will be solved!
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45 minutes to nanobooks?