One week before the opening of the Rubin Museum of Art, which focuses on the Himalayan region, its founders, Donald and Shelley Rubin, strolled through the galleries.

Despite the distraction of last minute touchups to the displays, their eyes stayed on the art.

“This one feels like an old friend,” Mrs. Rubin said. “It was in our dining room.”

The couple has lived with their art for more than 30 years. Now most of what they’ve collected is in the museum that bears their name – they have donated 900 paintings, sculptures, textiles, and prints from the second to the 19th centuries, from countries such as Tibet, Nepal, India, and China.

“There’s a story for every one of them,” Mr. Rubin said, his arms stretching in both directions. “Except the ones we borrowed.”

When he decided to open a museum, Mr. Rubin said that he “looked, absorbed from other museums, and just went my own way.” After all, he is an entrepreneur who made his fortune founding and running Multiplan, a health-care company.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Rubin mention the American Museum of Natural History as personal favorites. “And the Brooklyn – but it’s such a schlep,” Mr. Rubin said.

By contrast, their museum is located steps away from the bustling Chelsea art district in the space that once housed Barneys New York. The Rubins paid $22 million for the building, and it has taken six years to transform it. The total cost has been about $60 million, some donated by private and corporate foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I thought it would take two years. It took two years to get plans from the architect,” Mr. Rubin said.

Beyer Blinder Belle designed the museum, which contains five floors of galleries, a theater, a shop, and a cafe It opens Saturday.

Neither of the Rubins has formal education in art or the region from which they collect. Mr. Rubin took an art appreciation course in college, and Mrs. Rubin painted in her youth (and may start again; her daughter gave her a canvas and paints for her birthday last year).

“We are not Buddhists,” said Mr. Rubin, who explained his attraction to Himalayan art. “It’s the Dante story, it’s the transformation from hell to paradise. All of these pictures, it’s really getting rid of your inner demons so you can peaceful.”

Mrs. Rubin added, “The other part of the belief system is the personal journey, enlightenment. That’s something we find very attractive…that you are somehow in charge, that if you want to engage you can,” she said.

They’ve bought most of the art in New York. “There’s no art left in Tibet,” said Mrs. Rubin, noting that her husband is “truly the obsessive collector.”

Recently, the pace of their acquisition has slowed. “We don’t buy quite as much. It’s more focused and more museum-quality,” Mr. Rubin said.

His sense of pride was evident as he approached a work he bought six months ago.

“I just walked into a gallery on 57th Street. You couldn’t get a picture with more energy, the feel of it, the birds and trees.”

Pointing toward another canvas, he said “Look at that big one…it’s a Bhutanese painting. I bought it from Christie’s. It was covered in black soot, we got it very reasonable because it was so dirty. It took two years to clean it with Q-tips. And it turns out this is one of the most important Bhutanese pictures that’s ever been made,” he said.

Mr. Rubin discovered his most extraordinary treasure, his wife, at a party on Fire Island.

They danced to rock ‘n’ roll.

“We didn’t talk for five hours,” Mr. Rubin said. Mrs. Rubin added, “It was the first weekend of the very first share I ever bought in my life. It was luck.”

They went dancing on their next date, too.

“We moved in together, and that was it,” he said.

The two had a similar instant connection when they glimpsed their first painting in a gallery window on Madison Avenue.

“It was so much money, we didn’t have any money then, but we had to have it,” Mr. Rubin said. The painting cost $1,500.

Others soon followed.

“My theory about art, and about Shelley, it’s the same; it’s a totally emotional experience,” he said.

That first acquisition hangs in Mrs. Rubin’s office at the museum. She has been working full-time on the museum’s educational and public programs. She is already thinking of what must be done in the future. “The next step is strengthening the institution, building the board, shaping it, making it into a place that runs on its own,” she said.

The couple resisted using their own name for the museum. “We didn’t want to do it, we struggled with 20 or 30 different names,” Mr. Rubin said.

Now, “What I get a rush from is not the name recognition, but in having the dream and completing it,” he said.

“We didn’t come from money,” he added. “We both grew up here. My parents are immigrants. Shelley’s first-generation also. We both want to give back.”