Every museum has its star attraction: the painting, the fossil, the showpiece that draws the crowd. But the real treasure lives offstage. Tucked behind secure doors and steel shelving, the museum storage room is where the real magic hums (quietly, under climate control).
This is where 90 percent of the collection lives—the fossils, manuscripts, uniforms, and artworks that aren’t on display but still need constant care and preservation. Shelving, drawers, and racks fill every inch, and even the light switch comes with rules. Conditions stay consistent, pests stay out, and curators know exactly where every artifact rests.
When it’s designed well, a museum storage room keeps history healthy and ready to share. But even the best storage setups age fast. Shelves get crowded, workflows shift, and carefully planned layouts suddenly slip into organized chaos. That’s where storage stops protecting the collection and starts holding it back.
That’s exactly where the Cincinnati Museum Center found itself during the renovation of its historic Union Terminal. Faced with moving more than a million artifacts, the team needed more than just extra space and empty shelves. They needed a museum storage room that would make their collections safer, easier to access, and ready for decades to come.
A museum storage room is the living core of preventative conservation, designed to protect, organize, and extend the life of everything not on display. Think of it as both a facility and a process: four walls built for preservation, and a daily rhythm of care that keeps deterioration at bay.
For most museums, what’s behind the scenes determines what can ever reach the public. Proper storage stabilizes fragile materials, controls environmental risks, and ensures curators can find and handle what they need.
The room becomes a living buffer against every agent of deterioration, like light, moisture, temperature swings, pests, and plain old human error. Walls, floors, and HVAC form the first layer of defense. Cabinets, drawers, and shelving add another, until every artifact rests inside its own little ecosystem of safety.
Without that ecosystem, preservation can quickly turn into triage. With it, history stays healthy, accessible, documented, and ready for exhibition or research at a moment’s notice.
Designing that kind of space is easier said than done.
Collections never stop growing, but square footage rarely does. Systems that once worked perfectly start to strain under their own success. Balancing access and protection becomes the daily puzzle: drawers versus display, airflow versus footprint, flexibility versus security.
A well-planned museum storage room answers those tensions layer by layer — from the building envelope to the cabinets and boxes themselves — each one shielding objects from light, humidity, pests, and time. When these layers work together, they become more than storage. They become long-term stewards.
That long-term stewardship philosophy came to life when the Cincinnati Museum Center began renovating its historic Union Terminal, an Art Deco landmark built in 1933 and home to the city’s natural history, science, and children’s museums. To complete the restoration, every collection had to move out.
To make it happen, the museum’s collection storage rooms had to function as both temporary holding areas and long-term preservation environments.
“We needed to move over a million books and manuscripts, in addition to about 5,000 oversized artifacts from the History Museum and another 2,000 from the Natural History Museum,” recalled Jennifer Jensen, then-registrar at the Museum Center. “We have everything from paleontology to zoology — it spans a giant scope of human and natural history.”
The team’s existing museum storage rooms at the nearby Geier Collections and Research Center were never meant for that much material. Cabinets were full, shelves unevenly used, and floor space was long gone. “We were terrified we’d damage something irreplaceable,” said Jensen. “Some of those pieces hadn’t been touched in decades.”
Working closely with Jensen and her team, Patterson Pope helped re-engineer the Geier Center’s storage from the ground up, combining new systems with repurposed components that still had plenty of life left in them. Each collection type got its own tailored approach:
The payoff was immediate. “We were able to quadruple the amount of space we had,” said Jensen. “For the first time, the majority of our art actually fits on the racks in the space.”
Oversized artifacts now stand upright instead of lying awkwardly on their sides. Zoology moved from 5,000 square feet down to 2,000, with room left for a new prep lab. And collections that once competed for floor space now coexist in climate-controlled order. Each improvement strengthened the museum’s long-term collection care strategy.
The Cincinnati Museum Center’s renovation wasn’t just a facelift for a building. It was a full modernization of how a museum cares for its past. Proof that when museum storage rooms work, preservation thrives.
Every museum storage room tells a story about how a team balances space, preservation, and access under pressure. The Cincinnati Museum Center’s renovation showed what makes a storage system truly sustainable. Here are a few lessons worth borrowing:
Good storage design doesn’t always start from scratch. Cincinnati re-purposed existing cabinets and shelving, combining them with new systems to fit a broader plan.
Reusing what works (and replacing what doesn’t) saves money, time, and resources, all while keeping collections safely housed during transitions.
When space runs short, the only way forward is up. Compact mobile shelving and tall cabinets maximize cubic footage without expanding the footprint, a must for older buildings or shared collection spaces.
Cincinnati gained more than 12,000 square feet of usable storage just by designing smarter, not bigger.
Collections don’t stand still. Every acquisition, loan, or exhibit shift adds pressure to the system. Planning for growth means building flexibility into every level of storage: adjustable shelving, modular cabinets, and layouts that can evolve as your collection does.
In short, futureproofing is just good collection care.
When artifacts are easy to locate and retrieve, handling decreases and risks drop dramatically. Organized systems save hours of searching and, more importantly, save the collection from unnecessary wear.
In the end, the best museum storage rooms work the same way great exhibits do: thoughtfully designed, precisely executed, and built to last.
Cincinnati’s experience proves that when space is planned with a purpose, every drawer, rack, and cabinet becomes part of a larger preservation story. One that’s always ready for its next chapter.
That’s exactly what we love about this kind of work. Whether you’re planning a renovation or just running out of shelf space, we can help you build a system that fits your workflow and your collection. Contact a Patterson Pope rep today, because storage isn’t just what holds the past. It’s what protects the future.