Edgemar, Mixed-use art center in Main Street, Santa Monica, US

Edgemar is an art center on Main Street in Santa Monica, combining renovated warehouses, an Art Deco office building, and modern structures designed by architect Frank Gehry in 1988. The complex houses art galleries, retail spaces, offices, and event venues distributed across multiple levels and connected by open walkways.

The site started in 1908 as a warehouse for the Imperial Ice Company and was later used by the Santa Monica Dairy Company. In 1988, the entire property was redesigned into a modern art complex.

The name Edgemar comes from Edgemar Farms, the dairy that occupied the site before 1984; Abby Sher kept it for the development. The museum opened in the retrofitted 1908 ice warehouse, whose first show, Art in The Raw, ran from July 1988 in the unfinished space with works by Michael Brewster, David Bunn and Meg Cranston. In 1997 most of the museum floor became a theater center, with artist lofts facing Second Street.

Edgemar occupies the block of Main Street between Second Street and the ocean side, with the 1908 ice warehouse and its 1928 addition set back in the residentially zoned rear portion; a planter that doubles as a sound barrier separates the complex from neighbours. Parking includes one underground level, added during the 1988 approvals. The museum space was partly converted in 1997 into a theater and Second Street-facing artist lofts.

The 1908 Imperial Ice Company warehouse has 25-foot ceilings, clerestory windows and 8,000 square feet of clear span. Artist Thomas Eatherton, whose studio occupied a 2,000-square-foot metal outbuilding on the north end of the site, showed the space to neighbour Abby Sher and suggested turning it into a museum, the idea that launched the Edgemar project.