There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Iger had pondered this call for several days. He knew that fixing the mess at Disney Animation was the most crucial task facing him as CEO, and he had already decided that keeping Pixar was the key to any solution. From what he’d heard, Steve thought of him as a mere extension of Eisner—and frankly, Iger, who had always been a good company man, had given him little reason to think otherwise. He’d been quoted in the press defending Disney’s position in the tortuous Pixar negotiations, and he’d never spent any real time with Steve. But now there was this long pause, and Iger was beginning to hope that, just maybe, Steve was conflicted. “Well,” he finally heard from the other end, “I think I owe you the right to prove that you’re different. If you want to come up and talk about that, then that’s what we should do.”

ONE OF THE most delightful visits of all my years covering Steve occurred early in the summer of 1999, when he invited me to see Pixar’s new headquarters and studio in Emeryville, on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge. The animation company had been growing rapidly in the wake of its first two productions, Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, and had taken over a big lot in the middle of town, which had seen brighter days back when it was home to a slew of different manufacturers. Pixar was erecting its building on the former site of a Dole cannery.

Steve met me in the parking lot. The construction crews had left hours earlier; the only other people on the lot were two security guards. Steve directed me to go in through a side door, rather than the main doors, which were cut into the big glass wall where visitors and employees enter today. “Look up,” he said, before I opened the door. “Look up at those bricks. Have you ever seen a brick wall with so many colors? Just look at those bricks!” It was true; the bricks were, and still are, quite lovely. Each is one of twenty-four different earthy shades, from yellowish taupe to rust to maroon to chocolate brown with many more shades in between. The overall effect from a distance is of something like a subtly checkered moiré, with discolorations rippling through the surface in what seems like a totally random fashion. Except that it isn’t random at all. The bricks were manufactured by a single beehive kiln in Washington State, one that Steve’s supplier had reopened solely for the purpose of manufacturing bricks with the specific shades that Steve demanded. A couple of times, when Steve visited the construction site and saw the wall going up with a randomness that he deemed unpleasing, he had asked workers to tear down the wall. Eventually, the construction team figured out an algorithm of sorts to ensure that the bricks were distributed in a “perfectly” random pattern.

Again and again as we walked around the property, Steve delighted in both showing me a detail and explaining all the work that had gone into getting it just right. Inside the building, enormous steel girders gave off a greenish hue; they were beams from a unique mill in Arkansas, and had been varnished to achieve that extremely natural look. The workers at the mill had been told to handle them with special care; while most of their beams would be hidden within the walls of a shopping mall or skyscraper, these were never going to be covered up. The bolts holding those beams in place were of a slightly different, complementary color; Steve had me climb up a big ladder so I could get close enough to notice. Down in the atrium central lobby, the brick dome atop the cafeteria’s wood-fired oven for baking pizza, constructed with the same bricks as the exterior walls, was perfectly round, a mason’s masterpiece. Outside, youngish sycamore trees lined the long, broad path to the front door, the same kind of sycamores that line the Champs-Élysées in Paris, a city he and Laurene loved.

He was like a little kid showing me this, albeit a little kid who was hoping to convince a journalist that Fortune should devote several pages to a photo portfolio of his creation. My editors chose not to, in part because the building is not so much a jaw-dropping architectural statement. Its greatest beauty is that it is perfectly suited for its function. “It wasn’t that he was lovingly crafting a beautiful building,” says Ed Catmull. “It’s a higher thing. He was lovingly crafting a place to work in. That’s an important distinction.”

Steve’s initial design for the building was minimalist, based mostly on his particular aesthetic taste and his own ideas about how a great building can shape a great office culture. “His theory was very simple,” says John Lasseter. “He believed in the unplanned meeting, in people running into people. He knew how everybody works at Pixar, where you’re one-on-one with your computer. He had the theory of this big atrium that would be able to house the whole company for a company meeting, and that would have everything that gets you out of your office and into that center spine. It would draw you to the center, or have you crossing it, many times a day.” Steve was so set on this idea that he originally proposed that there be no bathrooms in the building’s two wings—there would be just one men’s restroom and one women’s restroom, in the central atrium. Catmull, the most masterful of the many people who had to figure out ways to manage Steve’s idiosyncratic excesses, patiently steered Steve clear of this particularly absurd example of his occasional advocacy of unrealistic means designed to achieve laudable ends. (Steve compromised and allowed bathrooms upstairs as well as in the atrium.)

Lasseter and Catmull also resisted the idea of a minimalist, glass-and-steel headquarters. It didn’t fit with either their industrial neighborhood or the rich, colorful, fantastical work being done by Pixar employees. “Pixar is warmer than Apple or NeXT,” says Lasseter. “We’re not about the technology, we’re about the stories and the characters and the human warmth.” They voiced their concern to Tom Carlisle and Craig Paine, the architects Steve had hired for the job. Carlisle and Paine hired a photographer to shoot the brickwork of the lofts in the surrounding neighborhood, and in San Francisco. Then, at the end of one of the days when Steve was working from Pixar’s Point Richmond headquarters, they laid dozens of those photos out on the table of a conference room. “He walked in and I remember him looking at all these beautiful photographs, all the details, and he walked around and around,” remembers Lasseter. “Then he looked at me and he goes, ‘I get it, I get it, you guys are right. John, you’re right.’ He got it, and he became a giant advocate for that look.”

The final result is a subtle, intuitive building. The central atrium is an enormous communal space with a first-rate cafeteria, a post office where each employee has a wooden slot for flyers, memos, personal notes, and the like, and plenty of room for informal conversations. It is bordered on the second floor by eight conferences rooms, labeled West 1 through 4 and East 1 through 4. “It’s like Manhattan,” says Lasseter. “I always hate when conference rooms get those cute names, because I don’t know where any of them are.” As movies are developed at Pixar—and there are usually four or five features and several short films in the works—the business teams allied with each film move as a group around the building, nearing the front door as their movie gets closer to its commercial release. The animators, on the other hand, don’t move. They’ve each decorated their offices to suit their own eclectic tastes: one looks like the outpost of a desert explorer; another looks like the room of a poker savant; one woman bought herself a plastic playground house from Costco and hung plastic plants in her “office,” while another created a two-story, wooden Japanese-style home with a tea service on the second floor. If you get on your hands and knees in one of the offices and press a little red button, you can crawl into the “Love Lounge,” originally a ventilating shaft that’s about five feet wide and that now sports leopard-skin wallpaper, Barry White music, and a red lava lamp. Steve signed the wallpaper: “This is why we built this building, Steve Jobs.”