Charles Eames (1907–1978)
Ray Eames (1912–1988)
203 Chautauqua Blvd, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
310-459-9663
ABOUT
Perched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Eames House comprises the landmark residence and studio of Charles and Ray Eames. Within the home is the couple’s collection of prototypal furniture pieces, contemporary artworks, and artisanal objects, displayed as it was during the Eameses’ time living there. Natural elements such as seashells and stones coexist comfortably with lamps by Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson, bentwood chairs by Thonet, and abstract impressionist paintings. In the adjacent studio, original objects are displayed alongside current exhibitions in connection with Charles and Ray’s design legacy.
SPECIAL RESOURCES
“The house would make no demands for itself and would serve as a background for life in work, with nature as a shock absorber.”
— Charles Eames, in the design brief for the Eames House
“The structure long ago ceased to exist. I am not aware of it.”
— Ray Eames, about the house being in harmony with the site
Charles Eames (1907–1978)
Charles Eames trained briefly as an architect at Washington University in St. Louis before being dismissed for his sympathies with the modernist movement — an irony that would come to define his career. After establishing an independent practice in Missouri, he was invited by Eliel Saarinen to join the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he became the school’s first director of industrial design, collaborated with Eero Saarinen on a prize-winning chair design entry to MoMA’s 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition, and met Ray Kaiser, his future wife and design partner. Following their marriage in 1941 and relocation to Los Angeles, the couple founded what became one of the most productive design offices of the twentieth century — producing work in furniture, architecture, film, and exhibition design distinguished by material ingenuity and philosophical consistency.
Ray Eames (1912–1988)
Ray Eames, born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California, came to design through a rigorous formation in the visual arts. After relocating to New York, she studied under Hans Hofmann — a pivotal figure in the transmission of European abstraction to American practice — and became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Her grounding in Hofmann’s theories of color, structure, and spatial composition proved foundational to the aesthetic language of the Eames Office, shaping everything from the palette of the fiberglass shell chairs to the graphic sensibility of the office’s films and exhibitions. Though her contributions were systematically overlooked during her lifetime, Ray functioned as a full creative partner in the collaboration — a distortion that subsequent scholarship has worked to correct. She continued directing the Eames Office after Charles’s death in 1978, and died on August 21, 1988, ten years to the day after him.
LEARN MORE
The Eames House site has its origins in the Case Study House program, launched by Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza as World War II drew to a close. Facing a looming need for modern, affordable postwar housing, Entenza invited leading architects to design homes rooted in the materials and techniques the war had produced. Charles and Ray Eames’ contribution — Case Study House #8 — became the program’s most iconic project.
The house as built was not the house first conceived. The original design, developed with Eero Saarinen in 1945, was a steel-framed residence cantilevered dramatically across the site’s open meadow. Material shortages delayed construction for nearly three years, during which Charles and Ray Eames spent their spare time on the land — picnicking, flying kites, doing archery, and welcoming family and friends to the meadow they had originally planned to span. By the time the steel arrived, Ray recalled, they had “fallen in love with the meadow” and recognized the classic architect’s mistake: destroying what made a site special by imposing a structure on it. Using the same off-the-shelf components — with the addition of just one extra steel beam — the Eameses reconfigured the design entirely, tucking both residence and studio behind a line of nearly seventy-year-old eucalyptus trees and into the hillside, preserving the meadow intact.
The two steel-and-glass structures, connected by a brick courtyard, were completed in 1949. Charles and Ray moved in on Christmas Eve and lived there for the rest of their lives. Charles’s daughter from his first marriage, Lucia, was a frequent presence at the house with her five children, and the studio — workshop, film set, and creative laboratory — was often transformed into a space for guests when family visited. It was here that some of the Eameses’ most celebrated work took shape, including films such as Toccata for Toy Trains and furniture designs that remain in production today. The residence, centered on a 17-foot double-height living room, reflected the couple’s belief that design should serve life rather than overshadow it: its interiors filled with folk art, toys, shells, textiles, books, and objects gathered from decades of travel, arranged alongside prototype furniture and work perpetually in progress.
The meadow, still untouched today, became their outdoor living room — a space for picnics, gatherings, and the slow observation that shaped their iterative design process. After Ray’s death in 1988, Lucia and her children inherited stewardship of the site, eventually establishing the Eames Foundation in 2004 to preserve the house and open it to public visitors. The site functions today as a three-dimensional record of Charles and Ray‘s thinking: design understood not as a finished product, but as a practice rooted in iteration, constraint, and care for human experience.
