Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Hidden among the expansive estates of Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood is the mid-century modern pilgrimage site known as Case Study No 8 — or, simply, the Eames House. The home created by the polymathic designers Charles and Ray Eames was both an architectural experiment and the couple’s residence from 1949 until their deaths.
On entering the grounds, a eucalyptus grove sweeps towards a clifftop view of the sparkling Pacific Ocean. Two modular buildings of glass, concrete and steel are set back into the hillside, connected by a brick courtyard. The austere exterior is warmed up by splashes of cobalt, orange, and gold — a Mondrian made dimensional.
The design brief stated that the house should intermingle “work and play, concentration [and] relaxation”. The Eameses aimed to integrate everything in their lives, encapsulated in Charles’s oft-quoted line: “Eventually, everything connects.”
Lucia Dewey Atwood, one of the couple’s grandchildren and a board member of the Eames Foundation, watched them trade ideas when she worked with them as an intern. She says the house’s natural setting was vital to them as “a respite from the challenges of work problems”. She recalls watching Ray step out of her car and inhale “that eucalyptus scent . . . just reinvigorating her”.
They collaborated on everything from furniture, including the now classic Eames chair, to films, exhibitions, toys and architecture. They were early adopters of materials such as plywood, which they moulded into lightweight, sculptural leg splints during the second world war. The wide-ranging applications of their curiosity and playfulness shaped their immense influence on modern architecture and design.
They were consummate hosts too. When Atwood’s family moved in to the studio after her mother’s divorce, she remembers “walking in and thinking, ‘Weren’t we wanted?’, because there was this huge pile of boxes. And then I saw Charles take a rope and climb up the stairs,” she recalls. She watched him “take the rope and go swinging, crashing into that pile of boxes. And I knew we were home”.
The Case Study programme was organised by John Entenza, the publisher of Arts & Architecture magazine, to provide innovative, cost-effective designs to meet the overwhelming housing demand after the war. Five houses were built on the same parcel of land, with renowned names including Eero Saarinen and Richard Neutra contributing. But the site-specific designs did not lend themselves to cookie-cutter replication, instead highlighting Modernist concepts.
The Eameses’ 1,500 sq ft home was both visionary and practical. The rooms of the upstairs loft are reconfigurable, while the high-ceilinged living room was often rearranged for film screenings and dinners.
A mishmash of books, candles, china, tins and sculptures is preserved from the time of Ray’s death in 1988 (Charles died 10 years earlier). For modern minimalists, the cluttered array may come as a surprise, but Ray liked to surround herself with everyday, quirky beauty, distinguishing between “stuff” and “good stuff” — the latter, she said, you can learn from.
“They lived and worked in the same way: with great intentionality,” Atwood says. She describes Ray’s talent for designing an environment or experience just so: “Why wouldn’t you live in a way that just supported the beauty?”
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
