In 2004, one of the most devastating fine art warehouse disasters on record destroyed an estimated $100 million in fine art property, including over 50 works by British abstractionist, Patrick Heron, and 100 works from the Saatchi Collection. Beyond the financial loss, the London Momart warehouse fire destroyed a significant horde of irreplaceable cultural property. This fire, coupled with the damages to art stored in warehouses taught us that our assumptions about the warehousing industry needed careful re-checking.

Warehouses play a critical role in safe-guarding property belonging to private collectors, museums and galleries world-wide. While vast troves of priceless personal art and objects are given over to warehouses for safe-keeping each year, there is currently no recognized standard by which the facility, its operations and its policies can be assessed to assure the optimal safety of its contents. The fine art warehouse industry operates without regulation or even a loose set of best practices guidelines.

With this in mind, AXA Art Insurance Corporation hired Global Risk Partners to develop a web-based Global Risk Assessment Platform (GRASP) to create and manage a risk assessment system for evaluating different warehouse facilities. Today, GRASP is part of AXA Art's worldwide risk management initiative called artprotect ™.

The objective of GRASP is to provide a single summary page for individual storage facilities which assesses specific risk/safety factors against agreed criteria. To do this, answers from over 1000 questions used by an on-site assessor are being distilled into matrices which profile the processes and functions of each individual facility. To ensure objectivity, the questioning process is binary - Yes or No. The system also "weights" those areas that we believe are more significant than others.

AXA Art launched artprotect ™ during 2007's AAM conference in Chicago . Since the start of this program, there have been over 45 surveys of art storage locations in the USA   alone, with more taking place in Europe , South America   and Asia . In the USA   there has been a thread of identified common weaknesses. These range from a lack of accountability for keys to poorly designed and installed intruder alarm systems to an absence of proper background checks on employees. In short, there is much that the art storage industry needs to do to address the primary risks that clients are exposed to.

Some of the early signs are encouraging in that the majority of art storage companies have responded positively to this program. Most have begun to implement changes to meet the standards that we believe reflect what is needed for the protection of increasingly valuable art. Many of the changes are procedural whereas some require capital expenditure. We and other insurers recognize that some of this investment cannot be committed overnight. What we are looking for is a commitment to improve standards over a realistic timeframe.

Below, please find those locations that have met AXA Art’s operating standards; this will be regularly updated. It is our intention to re-survey these companies every three years. For those companies that are well on the way to meeting AXA Art’s standard for best practice and have demonstrated a commitment to this process we intend to resurvey every 18-24 months. For those companies that had a poor initial ranking we intend to survey annually until such time as they reach a higher standard or until we no longer deem them a specialist art storage company at which time they will be removed from our database of professional service providers to the industry.

AXA Art Approved Warehouses

AXA Art provides the following names of specialist art storage companies based on risk assessments undertaken for AXA Art which indicate that these specific locations meet AXA Art’s standards of best practice for art storage.

The objective of the AXA Art artprotect™ program is to assist owners of art in their loss control efforts. The recognition of these art storage companies and specific locations is purely advisory and based upon conditions observed and information made available to our agents at the time of the risk assessment survey. While our agents have endeavored to discover those unsafe acts or conditions which could contribute to an accident or loss, it cannot be assumed that they have detected every loss potential or hazard, and nor does this assure compliance with any federal, state, or local code or law. We recommend that you undertake your own due diligence. We assume no responsibility for updating any information contained on this web page to reflect changing conditions. In no event will AXA Art or our agents have any liability for any special, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising in any way as a result of your reliance of this information.