Former Birkenstock site in Marin County sold to Eames Institute for $36 million – The Mercury News


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.

An Eames lounge chair and ottoman made from molded rosewood plywood with black leather upholstery and aluminum. (AP photo/Nick Merrick, Grand Rapids Art Museum )
An Eames lounge chair and ottoman made from molded rosewood plywood with black leather upholstery and aluminum. (AP photo/Nick Merrick, Grand Rapids Art Museum ) 

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.

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Llisa Demetrios, co-founder of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, climbs stairs as she passes a photo of her grandparents, Ray and Charles Eames, at the institute in Richmond, Calif. on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

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“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.

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Llisa Demetrios, co-founder of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, and John Cary, president and chief executive officer of the institute, take a walk through the former Birkenstock building in Novato, Calif., on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

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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.



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