Jobs particularly focused on the staircases, which echoed the one he had built at NeXT. When he visited a store as it was being constructed, he invariably suggested changes to the staircase. His name is listed as the lead inventor on two patent applications on the staircases, one for the see-through look that features all-glass treads and glass supports melded together with titanium, the other for the engineering system that uses a monolithic unit of glass containing multiple glass sheets laminated together for supporting loads.

In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian—a concern that it’s hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic. The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence. “We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity,” said Johnson. “Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity.” So designers in Florence picked out just the right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its companion tiles. “Knowing that it’s the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time,” said Johnson Does anyone know Steve well enough to call him on this.
of the stores was the Genius Bar. Johnson came up with the idea on a two-day retreat with his team. He had asked them all to describe the best service they’d ever enjoyed. Almost everyone mentioned some nice experience at a Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training program and came up with the idea of replicating something between a concierge desk and a bar. “What if we staffed the bar with the smartest Mac people,” he said to Jobs. “We could call it the Genius Bar.”

Jobs called the idea crazy. He even objected to the name. “You can’t call them geniuses,” he said. “They’re geeks. They don’t have the people skills to deliver on something called the genius bar.” Johnson thought he had lost, but the next day he ran into Apple’s general counsel, who said, “By the way, Steve just told me to trademark the name ‘genius bar.’”

Many of Jobs’s passions came together for Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006: a cube, a signature staircase, glass, and making a maximum statement through minimalism. “It was really Steve’s store,” said Johnson. Open 24/7, it vindicated the strategy of finding signature high-traffic locations by attracting fifty thousand visitors a week during its first year. (Remember Gateway’s draw: 250 visitors a week.) “This store grosses more per square foot than any store in the world,” Jobs proudly noted in 2010. “It also grosses more in total—absolute dollars, not just per square foot—than any store in New York. That includes Saks and Bloomingdale’s.”