The former Marin County campus of the Birkenstock shoe company is headed for redevelopment as a world-class art and design museum.
The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, dedicated to the legacy of midcentury designers Ray and Charles Eames, is buying the 88.5-acre property in Novato for $36 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The nonprofit currently operates out of a warehouse in Richmond.
Located at 8171 Redwood Boulevard, the 166,000-square-foot campus includes a 123,000-square-foot warehouse and a two-story, 43,000-square-foot office building. The warehouse will be repurposed to include office space for the institute as well as retail and restaurants next to various sculpture gardens and plazas.
How much it will cost to transform the site into a museum remains to be seen, though John Cary, president and CEO of the Eames Institute, believes it will be much more than what it’s paying for the property, according to the Chronicle.
“We love that it’s this billboard, this iconic gateway into Novato,” Cary told the Chronicle. “There is a lot of mystery and intrigue around it. We are just excited to turn it into a magical destination.”
The acquisition of the Birkenstock campus is “a transformational step for the Eames Institute,” Cary said in a statement, calling it “the culmination of a long-held dream and our deep commitment to the North Bay community,” per Dezeen. “This extraordinary space will enable us to expand our programming and reach a broader audience, while serving as a permanent anchor for creativity and innovation in the Bay Area.”
To bring the vision to life, the Eames Institute hired famed Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to design the redevelopment. Herzog & de Meuron’s past Bay Area work includes the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
The former Birkenstock property was built in 1964 as a distribution center for publisher McGraw Hill. The Eames Archives in Richmond currently has a tourist waitlist of nearly 1,000, and it has been as high as 4,000 since it opened in February 2024.
The hope is to attract 200,000 visitors annually once the new museum opens in 2028.
“One of my dreams is to have big yellow school buses roll up here,” Cary told the Chronicle. “Just to blow little kids’ pea-brain minds.”
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