The Eames Institute's archive of more than 40,000 objects occupies a renovated 1997 warehouse at 1324 South 51st Street in South Richmond. General admission runs $85; tours are capped at 12 people and run two days a week. A planned 166,000-square-foot campus in Novato has not displaced the Richmond address from the Institute's current visitor page.

On South 51st Street in Richmond, a 1997 industrial warehouse holds an archive of more than 40,000 objects from the studios and personal lives of Ray and Charles Eames: furniture prototypes, molded-plywood experiments, films, correspondence, tools, the couple's personal toy collection. The address is 1324 South 51st Street, in a flat industrial corridor roughly halfway between the Chevron refinery and Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park. You can visit, if you plan ahead.

The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity runs public tours on Thursdays and Fridays — two slots per day, capped at 12 people, running 60 minutes, bookable in advance. Tickets go on sale on the first of each preceding month at 10 a.m. Pacific. General admission is $85 per adult; seniors 65 and older pay $75; students with a valid ID pay $45. Each tour concludes with a "chair tasting" — the chance to sit in 15 pieces of iconic Eames seating. Llisa Demetrios, granddaughter of Charles and Ray Eames and the Institute's co-founder and chief curator, leads separate private 90-minute tours for groups of six to fifteen. The $85 admission price has drawn notice in online design forums, where visitors have weighed whether the experience justifies the cost for a tourist or a friend passing through.

The building's own provenance is a footnote worth reading alongside the visit. Architect Jim Jennings, who had earlier partnered with architectural bookseller William Stout as Jennings + Stout from 1980 to 1986 — a partnership documented in UC Berkeley's Environmental Design Archives — designed the warehouse in 1997 for medical equipment manufacturing, according to The Architect's Newspaper. Stout later occupied the building as William Stout Architectural Books; his departure from the address enabled the Eames Institute's acquisition, according to Fast Company. His name still appears — "William Stout Architectural Books" — in the navigation menu of the Institute's visitor page today, listed alongside Lars Müller Publishers, Museum, and Ranch.

Jennings did not lead the renovation. The 2024 gut project was handled by the Institute's internal design team alongside the firms Everywhere Architecture, Standard Issue, and EHDD, per The Architect's Newspaper and Dezeen. Before the work, said Sydnor Elkins, the Institute's Senior Director of Design and Construction, the building "had drop ceilings and brass-trimmed light fixtures and was very much divided up into dark little office spaces" — despite, he noted, "thoughtfully placed window openings and arrival sequences." The team's stated intent, as reported in both publications, was to preserve the architectural bones Jennings had put in. The archive opened to the public in February 2024.

What's less settled is how long it stays in Richmond. KRCB reported last year that the Institute is developing a new 166,000-square-foot campus in Novato. As of this week, eamesinstitute.org/visit still lists 1324 South 51st Street as the address for public tours, with no notice of a departure date.

What someone walking by on a Friday morning would see: a converted warehouse in an industrial block, a parking lot, a group of twelve assembling at the door at 9:45.