Former Birkenstock site in Marin County sold to Eames Institute for $36 million
The owners of the former Birkenstock campus, the Marin County landmark next to Highway 101 in Novato, plan to launch an art and design museum there.
The property was purchased by the Eames Institute, a nonprofit incorporated in 2019 for the purpose of preserving and cataloging the design archives of Ray and Charles Eames. The Eames were a husband-and-wife design team known best for their mass-produced ergonomic furniture such as the Eames lounge chair and ottoman.
The institute paid $36 million for the 88.5-acre property, which includes a 32,000-square-foot office building and a 134,000-square-foot warehouse that were built in 1964 for the McGraw-Hill publishing company. The warehouse, which features a unique roof that resembles a gigantic egg crate, has caught the eye of people diving by on the freeway for decades.
The campus was designed by John Savage Bolles, a prominent modernist architect, whose other Bay Area work included the IBM campus in San Jose, Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco and the former Candlestick Park.
McGraw-Hill moved out in 1991 and was replaced by Birkenstock a year later. Birkenstock, a shoe company that rode a wave of popularity fueled by the hippie movement during the 1960s and 1970s, left in 2020.
The Eames Institute owns three buildings in Richmond totaling 75,000 square feet where it conducts tours of the Eames archives. The collection consists of more than 40,000 objects, including early correspondence between Ray and Charles, artwork that predates their meeting, prototypes and process materials, industrial products and personal effects.
“Ray and Charles’ boundless curiosity for solving problems through design has been at the core of the Eames Institute’s mission, and this expansion will allow us to share those gifts with our community on an even larger scale,” said Llisa Demetrios, a granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames and the institute’s chief curator.
John Cary, the institute’s chief executive officer, said, “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.”
No new buildings are planned for the site.
“We’re really interested in adaptive reuse,” Cary said, “because the existing structures have inherent value that we could not replicate with new construction.”
The institute is working with the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, which designed the De Young Museum in San Francisco and Tate Modern in London, and San Francisco-based EHDD Architecture on the redesign plans.
The work of other designers also will be displayed in the museum. Cary said the former warehouse will be used for large-scale installations and events, while the former office building will house the institute’s administrative offices. The office building included a cafe and large industrial kitchen that will be put back into use.
The campus has been closed to the public for years, and the buildings have sustained some minor vandalism.
“There’s also some lore of skateboarding on the roof,” Cary said.
On Wednesday, behind the office building where there are wall friezes created by McGraw-Hill, shy deer and a jackrabbit darted away.
“We have a lot of deer and turkeys,” Cary said, “and until recently the property had two eagles and three bobcats.”
Cary said he didn’t have an estimate of the cost to complete the makeover, but said the institute will have to raise additional funds.
The institute’s 2023 tax filing, available on GuideStar, shows that it had net assets of more than $81 million. The nonprofit reported that in 2022 it received more than $61.9 million in revenue from gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees.
The institute’s purchase of the Birkenstock property is its second major investment in the vicinity in little more than a year. In May 2024, the institute paid $20 million to purchase a 193-acre property approximately 8 miles north of the Birkenstock building at 101 San Antonio Road in unincorporated Petaluma.
That site was originally the home of World College West, a liberal arts college that opened in 1973 and closed in the fall of 1992 because of inadequate funding. The Eames Institute purchased 101 San Antonio Road from the Hoffman Institute, which provides adult education and spiritual growth trainings.
“We intend to operate it like an educational retreat center in the same way,” Cary said. “We imagine that people will be coming from hopefully all over the region but also all over the world to visit the museum, and we want to have at least some accommodations available to them.”
The Hoffman Institute is leasing the property from the Eames Institute.
“At present it sounds like they are planning to vacate by May of 2026,” Cary said. “They have the option to lease back for another 12 months thereafter as well.”
Cary projects that the redesign work will be completed by 2028.
Cary said it is uncertain whether the institute will need to maintain its Richmond site once the Birkenstock property has been made over.
Local officials hailed the institute’s decision to expand in Marin County.
“I applaud the Eames Institute for their investment in our community and their commitment to building a more vibrant and creative future for our region,” said Marin County Supervisor Eric Lucan, a former Novato mayor.
Novato Councilmember Mark Milberg said, “This acquisition will transform a long inactive property into a powerful economic engine for Novato.”
Novato Councilmember Kevin Jacobs said, “This project will undoubtedly be a source of pride for our community for generations to come.”
Demetrios grew up on a ranch in Sonoma County. Her mother Lucia Eames hired Sea Ranch architect William Turnbull to design the ranch’s board-and-batten farm buildings. She and other family members are shareholders in Eames Office, a for-profit design and media studio that was founded by Charles and Ray Eames.
Demetrios said the importance of her grandparents’ archive “is not just seeing what they made but understanding how they made it and the questions that they asked.”
“I like to say that as amazing as my grandparents were as designers, they were more incredible as grandparents,” she said, “because they taught us these things without us even realizing we were learning something.”