Saving a legacy from LA’s wildfires: meet the Eames team

Photographs by Chris Mottalini

Demetrios and his wife were stationed at a safe distance, catching glimpses of the house through gaps in the flames. “That was a bleak night,” he added quietly. Though the house sustained significant smoke damage, it was largely spared any irreparable harm, in part due to the previous year’s effort to fell hundreds of trees surrounding the house. But any relief was tempered by the surrounding devastation. “It was awful, but we were so lucky... We’re the lucky ones,” he went on. Many in the neighbourhood were not so fortunate. More than 23,000 acres were burned, with 7,000 buildings destroyed. Twelve people died. “So many people have lost so much,” Dewey Atwood said. “We have lost an entire community, of schools and doctors, stores and friends. All of our neighbours. And it’s gone. It’s a visceral loss. I still can’t really go up there.”

For millions, Case Study House #8 is better known by another, simpler moniker: the Eames House. Conceived by Charles and Ray at the start of the 1940s, it was finished on Christmas Eve 1949. The couple had met at art school in Michigan, before moving to LA immediately after marrying in June 1941. Midwesterner Charles and Ray, a native Californian, had returned to her home state possessed with apparently limitless reserves of energy and ambition, inspired in part by Southern California’s impressive modernist architectural lineage – it was already home to work by Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, a friend and key influence of the couple. The Eames Office – the hyperproductive commercial ideas factory run by the couple – was established the same year and endures to this day. At first, they moulded plywood into sleek modernist furniture in their spare bedroom, before spending the Second World War manufacturing leg splints, body litters and spare aircraft parts with funding from the US Navy.

The Case Study House Program was spearheaded by John Entenza, the influential owner-editor of Arts & Architecture magazine. Its mission was nothing less than a revolution in residential architecture, to help combat LA’s postwar housing crisis and population boom. The emphasis was on creating easily repeatable, practical models, using inexpensive modern materials. Steel frames, clear horizontal lines and open floor-plans became their calling cards. “It is important that the best materials available be used in the best possible way for the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live in,” Entenza wrote in the January 1945 edition of Arts & Architecture. Thirty-six prototype designs were generated for the LA area and 25 were eventually built, the majority of which have endured to this day, including the Eames House. The project was a success: 350,000 visitors toured the homes before the programme ended in 1966. Along with the Eameses, several of the contributing architects – not least Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig – garnered international followings as high priests of modernism.

I visited the Eames House just a few weeks after it had reopened to the public following six months of painstaking restoration work, including meticulous cleaning by a disaster-recovery team, who hand-wiped the battered structure in full protective gear. Not many places in the city or its surrounds radiate understated wealth quite like the Pacific Palisades. Bordering the residential beachside idyll of Santa Monica, the dominant vibe is of self-confident, though not entirely self-serious, gentility. One is never, it seemed during my time in the area, too far from a group of slightly terrifying Lycra-clad power walkers or beatific elderly men, their white shirts unbuttoned to the naval.

On arrival, I was greeted by both Demetrios and Dewey Atwood – chair of the newly launched Charles & Ray Eames Foundation and head of the conservation and collections committee respectively – both smartly dressed, avuncular figures in their 60s. With his rectangular glasses and dark blue smock-shirt, Demetrios seemed to embody the Platonic ideal of laid-back Californian artist-curator, while Dewey Atwood had long straight grey hair and an aura of infectious earnestness. “For us, the house is a wonderful place to come and experience how Charles and Ray did their living and their working,” she said as we settled down, surrounded by the couple’s sketches, as well as one of their plywood elephants, designed in the 1940s as a sleek children’s toy.

The house’s enduring popularity as a pilgrimage site for architecture buffs was immediately apparent. Seconds after my arrival, an excitable stray German tourist had bounded into view, who was, after brief negotiation, permitted to take a photo of the house, despite having missed out on a tour earlier that afternoon. (Visits are typically only by appointment.) As a long time – and long-distance – admirer of the Eames House, my initial reaction to it carried a slight confusion. Like confronting any exceptionally well-known building in person for the first time, its actual dimensions didn’t quite match the scale of the structure I’d built in my imagination. Perhaps I should not have been surprised: fame has a way of flattening logic. For many observers, the humanness of its scale is precisely why the house has endured. The Eames House was never a gaudy folly or inhospitably stark modernist marvel, but very much a lived-in home and workplace. According to Dewey Atwood, my reaction is common enough. Visiting architecture students often remark on the same thing; that it felt smaller, more personal, than what they’d envisioned. “It’s the story of Charles and Ray’s lives. That’s what draws people in. They feel those emotional depths.”

The Eames House sits at the top of a steep hill with unbroken views of the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t require much imagination to see what drew Charles and Ray to the site, with its rolling meadowland, dappled in soft, apparently never-ending Californian sunshine. The house consists of two separate buildings: the residence and then a connected studio, spread across 2,500 square feet. Large glass panels are positioned at the east and west, to soak in the maximum amount of light, across its two stories. Leaning into the hillside, the house is shaded by a row of eucalyptus trees: an original quirk the couple refused to countenance chopping down. Its steel skeleton is fitted with glazed glass and panels, in a riot of red, blue, and black, spread over two stories. Outside, a tidy courtyard and patio blend gradually into the surrounding greenery. The intended effect, Demetrios explained, was to blur the divide between the house and its natural surroundings.

If still best known for their furniture – the Eames Lounge Chair is familiar to anyone with even a glancing interest in interior design – the couple’s creative output was extraordinarily diverse until Charles’s death on 21 August 1978, followed by Ray’s exactly a decade later. Whether in film (their 1977 short Powers of Ten was reportedly a key influence for the engineers behind Google Earth), philosophy, photography or toy-making, the guiding principle of their work was what Charles dubbed a “way-it-should-be-ness”.

Though fond of aphorism’s and mission statements (Ray once declared that “what works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts”) the couple were no ideologues. To the extent that they dealt in visions, they were only those that could be satisfactorily realised in the waking world. The Eames House exemplified this spirit. For generations of architectural critics, the consensus has remained unchanged. There are few, if any, finer examples of midcentury modernist residential architecture in the whole of the US. Taken together, the volume and diversity of the couple’s output can be daunting. “If they’d only made furniture they’d be famous for that,” said Demetrios. “If they’d only made Powers of Ten, they’d be famous for that. If they’d only made this house, they’d be known for architecture. That’s the extraordinary thing about their body of work.”

After the death of Ray in 1988, the house passed into the care of Lucia Eames, the only daughter from Charles’s first marriage. A talented artist and designer in her own right, she proved an indomitable advocate for the Eames legacy until her passing in 2014. “It was a beautiful way of being authentic to Charles and Ray,” is how Dewey Atwood put it. The decision was taken early on to preserve the house in aspic – today visitors aren’t allowed into the property, but are allowed to peer appreciatively through the window. Of Lucia’s five children, all, like Eames Demetrios and Lucia Dewey Atwood, are still involved to some degree in the ongoing curation of the Eames mythos. The Eames Foundation was established in 2004. The non-profit’s early sponsors included Herman Miller (then, as now, the manufacturers of the Eames Chair) and Vitra, the Swiss furniture company. The Eames Office, perhaps unsurprisingly, also chipped in.

The intervening years have seen the house designated a National Historic Landmark, as well as a groundbreaking collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute, to outline a long-term strategy for preserving the house. This, in turn, led to the rather grandly named 250 Year Project, run by Dewey Atwood. “We were so fortunate to have that partnership,” she told me. “When we approached them, we were basically saying ‘this is what we’re thinking of doing’. We wanted to do world class conservation and didn’t quite know what it meant.” In 2015, the Barbican hosted The World of Charles and Ray Eames, a superb retrospective of the couple’s work. Attending as a callow 22-year-old, I remember leaving dazed at the idea that two people could possibly possess such manic levels of productivity, as well as slightly bludgeoned by their maximum-velocity positivity and earnestness.

This summer’s reopening is marked by a couple of firsts for the family. If the house itself has long been open to the public for booked tours and visits, the adjacent studio, where Ray and Charles once worked, has not. This is set to change, with the space now available to host exhibitions and panel discussions, alongside other events. The freshly launched Charles & Ray Eames Foundation will manage this programme and regular conservation work, as well as the new, three-year Eames Fellowship aimed at design scholars with a special interest in the couple’s work. The first fellow is Catherine Lacy, curator of the Barbican exhibition and former chief-curator at the V&A East. Next year sees the launch of the Eames Architecture Initiative, spotlighting Charles and Ray’s work in prefab housing. In 2027, there are plans to rerelease Powers of Ten for its half-century anniversary.

I wondered how this schedule of relentless busyness and industry felt set against the disaster that had been so narrowly averted at the start of the year. Did it ever feel strange to consider just how close they had skirted to the unfathomable? Of course it had been frightening, they replied. But they really were the fortunate ones, said Dewey Atwood. “We’ve been planning on resiliency for over a decade. How do we address fire and drought? How do we address earthquakes and mudslides, and invasive species?”

Both she and Demetrios wanted to emphasise their rootedness in the local Palisades community. “It’s really important for the Foundation that this is a place of respite and a haven. A place of inspiration.” Around an hour into our interview, a group of unscheduled visitors wandered onto the property. Atwood rose to greet them, before returning 10 minutes later. Two locals, she added soberly, by way of explanation, whose homes had burned down in the fires.

Over its 70-plus-year history, the area has changed beyond recognition. When Charles and Ray began work on the site in the 1940s, the Palisades were not considered part of the city proper. “It was the boondocks,” laughed Dewey Atwood. “Their friends in Hollywood and Westwood were like, ‘We’ll never see you! You’re so far away!’ There was, she added, an artists’ colony at the foot of the hill. “And we know that artists live where it’s cheap.” This is assuredly not the case today. The Palisades are one of the most exclusive and affluent neighbourhoods in the whole of the US, a nation hardly famed for its privileging of history over profit. It has presented its own issues, when it comes to conservation. There has been no shortage of inquiring property developers over the years. “One of the challenges we have in America is that architecture is real estate. You could put a bunch of condos here.” The Foundation is at least protection against such a frightful idea.

Both Demetrios and Dewey Atwood were easy, enjoyable company. This is not always the case with custodians of blue-chip arts institutions, who often struggle to conceive of themselves placed anywhere other than the dead centre of the universe. This was not an affliction the Eames grandchildren appeared to suffer from. There was something pleasing in their self-evident enthusiasm for their grandparents’ legacy. For all of their eloquence and erudition– including the well polished, obligatory rundown of the house’s dimensions and key dates – both carried what I took to be a sense of quiet amazement; as if neither of them could believe their own good fortune at being the custodians of their forebears’ work. “The satisfaction you get when you finally nail the solution or feel you’ve contributed something”, said Atwood, “is enormous”.

This passion stemmed from something deeper than a mere love of design or the history of American modernism. Demetrios moved to LA in the mid-1980s, a few years before Ray died. “I got to know her as a grown-up, which is a different thing from knowing your grandparent as a child.” After her death, he embarked on an ambitious oral history project, interviewing around 200 collaborators and colleagues from the Eames Office, past and present. “It was very affirming and exciting. Nobody’s perfect, but all of those things we’re talking about were present. Their engagement and belief in equality. In humanity.” Dewey Atwood had lived in the house for a year after Ray had died. “I used to do yoga in the meadow and was surrounded by birdsong. There was less traffic then.”

The house, they continued, told nothing less than the story of their grandparents lives and extraordinary productivity: a story that they hoped would reverberate long after they were both gone. Preservation does not always mean a slavish devotion to the past, but attending to it in a way that Charles and Ray would hopefully have approved of. “Coming to the house is just one way of experiencing their entire body of work,” Dewey Atwood smiled. “Or you can sit in one of their chairs or see one of the films. You can be completely drawn in. The house is just one facet. But it’s a facet where the original intent is present. And you can still experience it.”

Constant experimentation and innovation was critical to their success

1945: Children’s Plywood Chair

Light enough so children could move them, the heart cutout was designed for little hands to grasp.

1945: Molded Plywood Animals

Today you can buy Eames elephants, but early on they experimented with frogs, bears, horses and seals.

1951: High Back Wire Chair

Production costs saw this design abandoned, but its form was a step towards the famous Lounge Chair.

1971: Secretarial Chair

This two-piece chair came in three models, two for office desks and one for drafting tables.