The Camron-Stanford House was built in 1876 and was home to five influential families as a residence before becoming the first museum in Oakland. Originally home to the Camron family from 1876-1877, the property was rented to the Hewes and Bartlett families from 1877-1881 and later purchased by the Stanford family in 1882. The descendants of the Stanford family sold the property to the Wright family in 1903, who eventually sold it to the City of Oakland in 1907.

The City of Oakland established the Camron-Stanford House as the Oakland Public Museum under Mayor Frank K. Mott. Much of the interior was changed to accommodate the building’s new function. The veranda was expanded, and the gallery rooms on the ground level were added at the rear of the house. The original kitchen was lost; the large fireplace downstairs was added as a part of a “Colonial kitchen” educational room.

By the late 1950s, plans for the new Oakland Museum of California were underway. The new museum combined the collections of the three Oakland museums into one new, modern, and innovative space. By 1965 the Oakland Public Museum had completely vacated the Camron-Stanford House, and the building’s future faced years of uncertainty. When the Oakland Museum of California opened in 1967, replacing the three earlier institutions (The Oakland Public Museum, The Snow Museum, and the Oakland Art Gallery), the fate of the deteriorating Victorian house was in question. A small group of individuals concerned about Oakland’s architectural heritage came together successfully to save the building from demolition. The Camron-Stanford House Preservation Association raised more than $800,000 (equivalent to approximately $5.5 million today) in capital and gifts-in-kind to fully restore the city-owned building for the community.
Restorers faced extensive alterations during the museum years, falling ceilings, and defective electrical, plumbing and heating systems. Lacking photographs of the interiors, L. Thomas Frye, Frances Rhodes, Wayne Mathes and other researchers selected items such as the wallpapers and friezes after carefully studying 19th-century guides to interior decoration, photographs of other local houses of the period, and the interior decoration of the Alfred H. Cohen house in Oakland. Descendants of the original residents of the house generously donated items to decorate the house’s first-floor period rooms. Other items were loaned from individuals and institutions, including the Oakland Museum of California.
The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. It is cited by the Historic American Building Survey, the California Landmarks Committee, and was given the honor of being designated Oakland Historical Landmark #2 in 1975. The Camron-Stanford House was opened to the public in May 1978 and has remained an active community space for learning about the city’s 19th-century history for nearly 50 years.
The Camron-Stanford House is of wood frame, two stories high with a full basement and attic, and of irregular plan with projecting wings and bays. The plan dimensions are approximately 50 ft. by 75 ft., not including additions constructed during the period the property served as the Oakland Public Museum and the original carriage house. The house is crowned with a prominent classic cornice supported by deep brackets and the paneled frieze's full depth. The seven-foot-wide main entrance stairs consist of eight risers terminating at an ornate porch that wraps around to the south side of the house, where it becomes a solarium. The porch cornice and roof are supported by slender columns, in diameter and 6’-4" high, including out-size capitals, which rest on railing high pedestals and have heavily molded column extensions and ornamental knee braces that support the cornice. Triple columns articulate the entrance stairs.

The entrance door opens into a central hallway eight feet wide, extending the house's depth. To the left, as one enters, is the reception room, and across the hall is the ell-shaped living room, which opens to the solarium. To the left, beyond the reception room, is the stair hall to the second floor and, beyond that, the dining room, pantry, kitchen, and servants' quarters. There once was a fireplace in the reception room, which still exists in the dining room. To the rear of the living room was another smaller room that could have been used as a library or music room, leading to a sun porch and garden stairway, which no longer exists. Architect Frederick Soderberg greatly altered the spaces to the rear of the dining room and the living room in 1909 when the home was converted into a museum and was again altered in 1913 by Architect John J. Donovan. When the house served as a museum, a lecture hall was added, and the carriage house was incorporated into the building.