The world’s most famous industrial design lab is found at the ground floor of Apple’s corporate campus at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. It’s arguably one of the most closely guarded offices on the planet. Even Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson was asked to interview Apple’s leading designer elsewhere most of the time. But one day in 2010, Jonathan Ive took the writer for a tour inside his design bunker. It holds “the future for the next three years”, the Briton told Isaacson. According to the just-released biography, the facility is as cutting-edge as cutting-edge gets.

Nobody gets past the guards without special access cards. The office has heavy locks and tinted windows. It features metallic gray decor and has powerful boom boxes that pump out techno and jazz music for a bunch of designers developing future design ideas. Expensive prototyping equipment can be seen inside and various machines to apply paint and make countless foam models of future products are everywhere.

Jobs would often visit Ive’s design lab to actively participate in the design process and his artistic sensibilities were crucial for Apple’s design prowess, Ive said:

Apple’s design guru also tells how they often obsessed over the packaging for Apple products:

But it wasn’t all peachy. The designer would at times get upset with his late boss for “taking too much credit”, which didn’t sit well with Ive’s introvert personality and especially his careful consideration to always put his team’s efforts first and foremost:

Over time, Ive would learn to avoid politics at Apple. This in part helped him become one of Apple’s most valuable assets.

Look no further than a lengthy BusinessWeek profile, which describes iOS chief Scott Forstall as having a fraught relationship with Jony Ive and hardware chief Bob Mansfield. It was so bad, sources claim, that Mansfield and Ive avoided meetings with Forstall unless Tim Cook was present. Yet, even under those circumstances best ideas would win, not people – which is saying a lot for gadgets that are textbook examples of hardware working in concert with software. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive were also close friends. Jobs numerous times publicly referred to Ive as “one of my best friends in the whole world”, such as during the original iPhone introduction in January of 2007 or three and a half years later at the iPhone 4 unveiling.

Speaking at a private celebration of Steve Jobs’ life Apple organized for employees last week, Ive said this of Apple’s co-founder:

Next remark drew a laughter of acknowledgment (Ive calmly emphasized the last three words):

Jobs would unfortunately pay the ultimate price for such a fanatical approach to the design process, Ive asserted:

The design guru said they both enjoyed the journey itself, not the fruits of their labor:

You can check out Ive’s speech by skimming to the 48:30 mark in the Celebrating Steve video Apple posted on its site.

Jony Ive shared moving memories about Steve Jobs with thousands of Apple employees at a private event organized at Apple’s corporate campus.