“I always have my own rules, and I can bend them if I want,” White says. Photographs by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

Last summer, Jack White bought a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that he had seen only in photographs. He wasn’t planning to live in it, except perhaps occasionally on retreats—he lives in Nashville. He was drawn to its past. The house was designed by George Nelson, a figure in American modernism, who mostly designed furniture. “A George Nelson house, there’s not too many of those,” White said in a car on the way there.

White is forty-one, and since his adolescence, in Detroit, when he was an upholsterer’s apprentice, he has been avidly interested in modern design. He used to drive around the city looking for thrown-out furniture, and sometimes he found Nelson sofas and chairs and restored them. He saw himself more as a custodian of the Nelson house than as its owner. “I’m a believer in nobody owns anything,” he said. “If you could take care of it and pass it along, it’s good.” The car travelled through farm fields beneath a dome of blue sky. “Anyway, it’s a place I can go and write songs and shake up my environment,” he continued.

White used to be exclusively a rock star—he was half of the White Stripes—but his interests are diverse, and he has lately stopped touring and writing to dispose of them. His company, Third Man Records, which is based in Nashville and Detroit, produces vinyl records and sells them from stores at its offices. Third Man’s catalogue includes roughly four hundred titles. Some are reissues (old blues songs, Detroit garage bands such as the Gories, and early Motown recordings), some are original records that White produced (Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Wanda Jackson, and Karen Elson, White’s second wife, from whom he is now divorced), and some are recordings of concerts held at the Nashville offices (Willie Nelson, Pearl Jam, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Detroit hip-hop artist Black Milk). White’s “Lazaretto,” a Third Man record from 2014, sold forty thousand copies in one week, more than any other record since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan began following vinyl sales.

White’s most recent record, released in September, is “Jack White Acoustic Recordings 1998–2016,” which is a retrospective, mainly of White Stripes songs. It quickly became the No. 1 vinyl record in the U.S. and the No. 8 album over all, but it’s only one project among several. White wrote the song “Don’t Hurt Yourself ” with Beyoncé, and sang it with her on her album “Lemonade.” He plays guitar in the Raconteurs, a band that started in Detroit in 2004, and drums in Dead Weather, which started in Nashville in 2009; he sings in both. In these bands, he collaborates, but he still sounds like Jack White.

Over the course of any day, White is boss, bandmate, producer, project supervisor, businessman, pragmatist, and idea man. “Mr. American Work Ethic” is how an acquaintance of White’s described him to me. White says that Third Man Records is not in business to make money. (It does.) He wants the company to produce objects and projects he cares about, in the belief that if they appeal to him and his staff, they will appeal to others, even if they appear pointless.

In the White Stripes, White was part creative director and part brainy impresario. The band’s other member, the drummer Meg White, was taciturn punk muse. Meg was also his girlfriend, then his wife, then his ex-wife, though for a long time they told everyone that they were a family band, and that she was his sister. Between 1999 and 2007, they made six records. (The group split up in 2011.) Their second record, “De Stijl,” made in 2000, was an homage to the nineteen-twenties Dutch modernist movement of the same name, whose members included the painter Piet Mondrian. De Stijl reduced artistic forms to fundamental terms, and the notion of restrictions appealed to White, who believes that, as far as his imagination is concerned, having too many choices is stultifying. The number three is essential to his purposes. He says it entered his awareness one day when he was an apprentice in the upholstery shop. He saw that the owner had used three staples to secure a piece of fabric and he realized that “three was the minimum number of staples an upholsterer could use and call a piece done.” The White Stripes were built around the theme of three—guitar, drums, and voice. As both a stance and a misdirection, they wore only red, white, and black. White wanted the White Stripes to play the blues, but he didn’t want to be seen as a boy-girl band attempting them.

“The first thought when we started was that we were an art project with punk-rock theatre,” White said in the car. “My voice was so cartoony, so high. We were playing with how much can we mix it all with the blues.” Just as De Stijl was about compressing forms, “the blues were taking music down to three chords, twelve bars, three lines,” White said. “The simplest components. You’ll see some of that in this house.”

The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, on a wooded lot. It was long, like a barge, with a flat roof and rows of windows along the front. Its previous owner, a man named Dave Corner, was standing in the driveway. He had white hair and was wearing jeans and an untucked shirt. White sees many of his experiences as worth documenting, and he had hired a film crew to record him and Corner talking about the house. He wore a tight black suit, a black shirt, a yellow tie, and yellow plastic wing tips for the occasion. While the crew set up indoors, he paced in the driveway. White’s manner is restless—a foot or a leg or an implement in his hand is nearly always in motion. His bright shoes rising and falling against the pavement made him appear to be dancing.

The camera crew was in the living room, at one end of the house. Corner sat on a couch and White sat in a chair beside him, as if on a talk show. White asked Corner what his favorite part of the house was. “This living room,” Corner said. “It’s so peaceful.” The room had windows that rose to the ceiling, and beyond the windows were woods. White asked what the rain sounded like on the flat roof. “Like heaven,” Corner said. White said that in Nashville he’d had microphones installed under the eaves of his home, so that he could hear the rain better. He has two young children, a boy and a girl, from his second marriage, and he said that his ability to make the rain louder had led them to believe that he controlled the weather.

More people know a fragment of White’s music than know his name. That is because the signature guitar riff from his song “Seven Nation Army,” which the White Stripes recorded in 2003, became an internationally ubiquitous stadium anthem. It might be the second-best-known guitar phrase in popular music, after the one from “Satisfaction.” It consists of seven deliberate, somewhat ominous, mainly descending notes. When the phrase occurred to White, he thought he might use it if he was ever hired to write a song for a Bond movie.