Mark and Janet Hilbert put nearly $12M into the expansion of their namesake art museum in Old Towne Orange, which opens to the public on Feb. 23.
The best investment going forward for Mark Hilbert might be for a comfortable pair of shoes.
The founder of Hilbert Property Management gives guided tours to the public on Thursdays at the museum, and last week he gave a tour of the new Hilbert Museum of California Art to the Business Journal.
It’s a much longer tour for Hilbert, given the nearly tripling in size in space for the museum to 22K SF.
The museum packs a lot of art into its space; Hilbert said it will be the largest art museum in Orange County in terms of linear footage of display space.
The prolific art collector revealed he had walked and counted the number of steps at a few local museums to be sure.
Hilbert counted 1,084 paces across the two buildings’ displays, compared to 637 paces at OCMA—whose new facility totals 53K SF—and 435 paces at the 19K-SF Laguna Art Museum.
See our front-page feature for more on the new facility.
Mark Hilbert won’t say what his favorite piece of art at the museum is, but he has a clear affinity for Millard Sheets, whose 1969 mosaic “Pleasures Along the Beach” offers an eye-opening entrance to the new facility; see Emily Santiago-Molina’s story on page 11 for more on the backstory of the artwork.
The Hilberts have about 50 pieces by Sheets in their collection and are considered one of the largest collectors of his work. Highlights that are part of the opening exhibitions at the Hilbert Museum of California Art include “San Dimas Train Station” and “Symphony Under the Stars (Hollywood Bowl).”
Close followers of the Business Journal’s annual listing of the area’s top newsmakers, the OC500, will also recognize several works spread across the new museum. We’ve used artwork from the Hilbert collection for the OC500 for each of the past six years.
Shares for San Jose-based smart TV and streaming device company Roku (Nasdaq: ROKU) took a nearly 9% dip on the day last week when news broke that Walmart (NYSE: WMT) was considering buying Irvine’s Vizio (NYSE: VZIO) for more than $2 billion.
That hit could’ve been worse, given Roku’s dependance on Walmart for its sales; its TVs are sold in-store exclusively at the retail giant, and a visit to a Walmart store in Irvine last week showed an electronics section dominated by that company’s orange-boxed, low-priced products.
Roku “is the #1 smart home brand by shelf space” at Walmart; sales at Amazon and Walmart accounted for 59% of that company’s devices revenue in 2022, according to Roku’s latest annual report.
If a deal for Vizio is struck, it would be the largest reported acquisition for Walmart since 2018, when it paid nearly $16 billion for 77% of Flipkart, an Indian retailer.
Roku is currently valued around $10.4B, while Walmart’s worth $456B.
