Marbles Kids Museum is expanding, and we got a peek inside its new building

Marbles Kids Museum — which attracts 700,000 visitors a year to its main building and adjacent IMAX movie theater — is expanding.

The first step of the downtown Raleigh museum’s ambitious plans opened this week: a Play Annex next door to Marbles’ 86,000-square-foot main building.

Marbles bought the 16,000-square-foot building at 207 E. Hargett St., for $3.1 million. The building, most recently Longleaf School of the Arts, will be used for summer camps and group activities. Museum leaders say that will free up space in the main building for play.

But that’s just the beginning.

“When this building was built, nobody could have imagined it would be as busy as it is now,” said Marbles CEO Sally Edwards. “The lobby is way too small, we need to reconfigure the whole experience.”

Step two will be even more aggressive. Marbles is in the early stages of conceptualizing a new building that will connect the annex with the museum building and its IMAX theater.

“One thing we’ve heard a lot is that being able to access all the buildings through a single hub entrance would enhance the experience,” Edwards said.

This phase will take years to complete. Marbles just put out a request for bids to design the new building.

The building that houses Marbles originally opened nearly 20 years ago as Exploris. It became Marbles in 2007, merging with the children’s museum Playspace.

The complex faces Moore Square, which is also undergoing an extensive renovation.

With expansion on its wish-list, Marbles management has undertaken multiple interior construction and renovation projects in recent years to maximize its useable space. The opportunity to buy the Longleaf School from owner MDO Holdings was too good to pass up.

“MDO had the opportunity to put another charter school in there,” said Edwards. “But they had a vision of the highest and best use of that building, which was expanding what Marbles could do for the community. We were at a point where we could afford to take on some debt.”

Now that the new building’s first floor is open as Play Annex, attention will turn to what to do with the second floor.

The ground-floor renovation cost several hundred thousand dollars, Edwards said, with volunteers and in-kind donations lowering the cost.

Getting the second floor useable, however, might require installing an elevator. So Marbles will have to do some fundraising first.

“We’re very committed to accessibility and inclusion,” said Edwards. “So if we do any public programming up there, we’ll need an elevator, which will make it a lot more expensive than the first floor. We’re just using it for storage now. But I’m sure there are higher, better uses.”

This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 11:43 AM.