The Eames House

Case Study House #8: how Charles and Ray Eames set aside a permitted design, reconfigured the catalog steel ordered for it, and built the home and studio where they lived and worked until their deaths.

The Eames House stands at 203 North Chautauqua Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a bluff above Santa Monica Bay at the northern edge of Santa Monica Canyon (Burke et al., 2018). Charles and Ray Eames designed it as their home and studio under the Case Study House program of Arts & Architecture magazine, where it was House #8, and they moved in on Christmas Eve in 1949. It consists of two steel-framed volumes, a residence of about 1,500 square feet and a studio of about 1,000, set end to end against a concrete retaining wall and separated by an open court (Historic Resources Group & National Park Service, 2005). The Eameses lived and worked there until their deaths, in 1978 and 1988, and the house still holds their furniture, books, and collections. It is a National Historic Landmark, a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, and a house museum visited by nearly 20,000 people a year (Burke et al., 2018; Eames House, 2026). The built design is the second scheme for the site. The first, drawn by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in 1945, had been permitted and its steel delivered when the Eameses replaced it in the fall of 1948 with a plan that left the meadow in front of the house open.

The Designers

Charles Eames was born in 1907 and grew up in St. Louis, where he studied architecture for two years at Washington University before being asked to leave because his views were considered too modern. He opened a practice with Robert Walsh, designing churches and houses in Missouri and Arkansas, and Eliel Saarinen later invited him to Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he became the first head of its industrial design department and befriended Eliel’s son, Eero (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-a). Ray Kaiser was born in 1912 and raised in Sacramento. She pursued fashion, theater, and painting, studied in New York with Hans Hofmann, and helped found the American Abstract Artists group before applying to Cranbrook to expand her practice (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-a).

Their partnership began when Ray helped Charles and Eero Saarinen with their winning entry in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition. They married in 1941 and moved to Los Angeles, where they experimented with molded plywood in their apartment and, during the war, adapted the technique to make leg splints and aircraft parts for the U.S. Navy, work that led to the founding of the Eames Office (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-a). Ray stated the principle behind their work as “What works good is better than what looks good” (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-a).

The Land

The bluff was part of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, a 6,656-acre Mexican land grant made in 1839 to Francisco Marquez and Ysidro Reyes and partitioned among their heirs in 1882 (Burke et al., 2018). In 1887, a syndicate headed by Abbot Kinney bought a 247-acre parcel at the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon and planned a residential district called Santa Monica Heights. Kinney, an enthusiastic promoter of the eucalyptus, graded streets and planted rows of the trees across the mesa. The development largely failed after the real estate market collapsed in 1888, but the trees remained, including the row that now stands along the front of the Eames House (Burke et al., 2018). The bluff later passed to the actor and humorist Will Rogers and his wife, Betty, who acquired the parcel in 1927 and consolidated their holdings there in 1931 (Burke et al., 2018).

In January 1945, John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture, bought the five-acre parcel above the bluff from the Rogers estate as an incubation site for his Case Study House program. He divided it into six lots, sold four smaller ones, and kept the two larger lots for his own house and for the Eameses. Charles and Ray purchased their lot from Entenza in July 1948 (Burke et al., 2018). Two other Case Study houses were completed on the bluff in 1948: Rodney Walker’s House #18 and Richard Neutra’s Bailey House, House #20 (Burke et al., 2018).

The Program and the Brief

Entenza announced the Case Study House program in the January 1945 issue of Arts & Architecture. He proposed the design and construction of eight houses, each meeting a specific living problem in Southern California, and invited architects chosen for their ability to judge the needs of a particular client and site and to use new materials and techniques (Burke et al., 2018). Manufacturers supplied materials at a discount in exchange for coverage in the magazine, and the finished houses opened to the public for six to eight weeks. According to the critic Esther McCoy, 368,554 people visited the six houses completed in the program’s first three years (Burke et al., 2018).

The Eames and Entenza houses were published together in December 1945 as two houses for people of different occupations but parallel interests, both designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen (Burke et al., 2018). The magazine acknowledged that neither house addressed typical living problems. The client for House #8 was described as a married couple, both occupied professionally with mechanical experimentation and graphic presentation, who needed a house that made no demands for them and served as a background for life and work (Burke et al., 2018). The couple in the brief was Charles and Ray. The client for House #9 was Entenza, a single man who needed space for entertaining and a study for uninterrupted work. His house, a 42-foot square with a concealed steel frame and an all-glass south wall, was built close to the 1945 design and published in July 1950 (Burke et al., 2018).

The Bridge House

The first scheme, later called the Bridge House, was a simple rectangle of steel and glass projecting from the hillside at a right angle and raised above the meadow on a pair of slender steel columns. A glass wall faced the ocean. Residents would climb a spiral staircase from a parking area beneath the house, and a separate studio sat against the hillside behind the trees (Burke et al., 2018). The parts were to come entirely from steel fabricators’ catalogs (Eames House, 2026). The structural engineer, Edgardo Contini, described the Eames and Entenza designs as exercises in contrast: the Bridge House displayed its structure, while the Entenza House hid its light steel frame inside a sheath of other materials (Burke et al., 2018).

The materials were ordered, but postwar shortages held up the steel until late 1948 (Eames Office, n.d.). While they waited, Charles and Ray spent their free time on the site with family and friends, picnicking, flying kites, and practicing archery. By the time the steel arrived, in Ray’s words, they had “fallen in love with the meadow” (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-b). The Foundation explains that they recognized what it calls the classic architect’s mistake, destroying the quality that makes a site special by imposing a building on it (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-b). The Bridge House would also have required cutting down two trees in the eucalyptus row (Burke et al., 2018).

The Eameses gave a second, more technical reason. Ray explained that the Bridge House did not justify the cost of its steel, so they set out to find the largest volume that the same materials could enclose (Burke et al., 2018). Historians have proposed other motives. Some have noted the scheme’s resemblance to a Mies van der Rohe sketch of a glass house on a hillside that Charles saw at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1947, and Contini thought it resembled a house Saarinen had designed in 1941 (Burke et al., 2018). The Getty’s researchers found that planning for the Bridge House continued well into 1948. The city issued a building permit for it on September 23, 1948, naming Eames and Saarinen as architects. Three weeks later, on October 14, drawings for an entirely new design were complete, and a new permit followed on November 3 (Burke et al., 2018).

The Redesign

Charles and Ray reworked the design together, and Saarinen had no part in the version that was built (Eames House, 2026). Charles was not licensed in California, so the architect of record was Kenneth Acker of the Eames Office, and the engineering passed to the firm of Mackintosh and Mackintosh (Burke et al., 2018). Charles was credited alone at first, but Ray is now widely recognized as co-designer, which makes her the only woman on the roster of Case Study architects. Surviving color and fenestration studies in her hand show her testing alternative patterns for the facades (Burke et al., 2018).

The new design swung the residence ninety degrees into line with the studio, took it off its stilts, and set both buildings on the ground at the foot of the slope behind the eucalyptus row. The meadow was left open. The Eameses treated the original components as a kit of parts to be rearranged, an approach the historian Beatriz Colomina has identified as a constant in their work (Burke et al., 2018). The Foundation’s account says the reconfiguration required only one additional steel beam (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-b). That claim is disputed. After comparing the working drawings for both schemes, the architect Edward R. Ford concluded that many new components would have been needed and others substantially modified (Burke et al., 2018). Whatever the exact count of new parts, the built house uses its steel more efficiently than the Bridge House and encloses more space (Burke et al., 2018).

Fitting the buildings between the slope and the trees took considerable excavation. An eight-foot concrete retaining wall was cast into the hillside to form the lower part of the rear walls, and the excavated soil was shaped into a planted berm that screened the house from the Entenza House next door (Burke et al., 2018). The wall runs about 200 feet (Eames House, 2026).

Structure and Materials

The house is built on a module of bays twenty feet deep and seven feet four inches wide, rising seventeen feet. Each bay is framed by two 4-inch steel H-columns set twenty feet apart and topped by a 12-inch open-web joist. On the rear elevation, the columns are partly embedded in the retaining wall, and steel decking running perpendicular to the frames forms the underside of the flat roof (Historic Resources Group & National Park Service, 2005). The residence is eight bays long, including a one-bay overhang that shelters the south court, the central court is four bays wide, and the studio is five bays long (Papineau, n.d.).

The steel cage is filled with a mix of clear, translucent, and wire glass and opaque panels, some brightly painted and some left gray, placed according to the needs for light and privacy inside (Burke et al., 2018). Charles specified a rubber-based coating mixed to a dark, warm gray for the steel and metal sash. He wrote that this gray line did more than anything else to express the structure and held together the stucco panels of white, blue, red, black, and earth. The frame is now glossy black (Burke et al., 2018). The Eameses tested colors with inexpensive Sears paint and made few changes afterward (Burke et al., 2018). Many of the opaque panels are Cemesto, an asbestos-cement board over a fiberboard core made by the Celotex Corporation. More than half of the Cemesto panels are original, and their hazardous content makes them one of the site’s hardest conservation problems (Getty Conservation Institute, n.d.).

Construction

Excavation began in late 1948 or early 1949, and by March 1949 the retaining wall and steel frame were in place. Arts & Architecture reported that the frame went up in a day and a half with a total of ninety man-hours, and Charles recalled that the steel decking and factory sash followed in short order (Burke et al., 2018). The general contractor was Lamport, Cofer, and Salzman, which built several other Case Study houses. Eames Office staff worked both on site and in the office shop, and much of the house was made by hand. The Cemesto panels were about a quarter inch too thick for the sash and had to be rabbeted to fit. The staff member Don Albinson adapted window frames and made parts that no catalog offered, and the office built the sliding door frames and tracks, the spiral staircase, and some of the built-in cabinetry (Burke et al., 2018). Charles and Ray applied some of the finishing touches themselves, including the gold leaf above the front door (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-b).

The cost cannot be verified, since the records have not been found. Charles said the house cost about the same as a conventional house of good quality and that the retaining wall accounted for more than its share (Burke et al., 2018). Architectural Forum estimated that labor for the steel frame amounted to about a third of the cost of the steel, compared with about half the cost of materials for conventional wood framing (Burke et al., 2018).

The Residence

The front door, set in the east facade, is barely visible when closed. It opens onto a hall that runs the length of the ground floor, with the spiral staircase directly opposite, lit from a skylight above (Burke et al., 2018). The hall leads south to the double-height living room, which looks through its glazed south wall across the partly covered south court and the meadow to the Pacific. The ceiling extends over part of the court, and the tallowwood paneling on the west wall of the living room continues outside onto the court’s rear wall. Charles told Architectural Forum that he used wood there because he needed something to nail into (Burke et al., 2018). A movable ladder made in the Eames shop hooks onto the open-web joists, giving the room vertical circulation and a way to hang objects and change lightbulbs (Burke et al., 2018). Through the east windows, the view of the meadow is filtered through the eucalyptus trunks, and the gray paint on the interior steel complements the color of the bark. Pleated drapes of natural linen and rayon by Deering Milliken hung at nearly every living room window (Burke et al., 2018). The hall and living room floors, bare concrete at first, were covered with white vinyl asbestos tile before 1955 (Burke et al., 2018).

The bedrooms occupy the upper floor above the north half of the living room and overlook it from a balcony. A movable floor-to-ceiling panel divides the space into two rooms, and sliding canvas panels in the manner of Japanese shoji screens close the sleeping areas off from the balcony (Burke et al., 2018). Beneath the bedrooms is an alcove with a built-in sofa, a stereo speaker, and cabinets, forming an inglenook without a fireplace. Its rosewood end wall faces the living room, and it is the only carpeted surface in the house (Burke et al., 2018). The kitchen and dining area sit at the north end of the ground floor. An accordion door can separate them, though Ray said it was never used because she and Charles preferred open spaces (Burke et al., 2018). On the south court stands a sculpture of three charred wooden piles salvaged when the Venice Beach pier was demolished in the late 1940s, which Ray said they kept as a remembrance (Burke et al., 2018).

The Studio

The studio mirrors the residence at a smaller scale. A two-story section at the south end holds a kitchenette, bathroom, utility nook, and darkroom beneath a mezzanine used for storage, work, and guests, and a double-height workspace fills the north end. The mezzanine was first reached by a painter’s ladder, later replaced by an open steel stair with wood treads built in the Eames shop. A photographic mural of the ruined Venice pier runs along the mezzanine fascia. The concrete floors were covered with wood parquet in the late 1950s (Burke et al., 2018). Charles wrote that the wire glass in the studio windows, chosen at first for safety, became an important aesthetic element, defining the plane of the wall while allowing the eye to pass through it (Burke et al., 2018). The studio served as a workshop and as a film set, including for Toccata for Toy Trains (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-b).

Climate and Landscape

The house relies on passive heating and cooling. The west walls are built into the slope, the buildings are positioned to catch ocean breezes, and cooling comes mainly from sliding doors and operable windows. The south court overhang and the eucalyptus row provide shade, and the living room faces south to take in low winter sun. A forced-air heater was installed but used sparingly. When asked about the heating system, Charles is said to have pointed to his sweater (Burke et al., 2018).

The meadow was planted in rye with scattered wildflowers, left to turn yellow in the dry season and mown once a year. The areas close to the buildings were gardened more intensively, with brick, wood, and marble paving, gravel paths, and a walkway originally made of railroad ties (Burke et al., 2018). The eucalyptus trees serve as an overwintering site for clusters of monarch butterflies (Burke et al., 2018). In 1962, after thirteen years in the house, Ray told McCoy, “The structure long ago ceased to exist. I am not aware of it” (Burke et al., 2018).

Living in the House

The earliest photographs, by Julius Shulman, the Life photographer Peter Stackpole, and the Eameses themselves, show nearly empty rooms. Within a few years the house had filled with toys, folk art, textiles, shells, stones, George Nelson lamps, antiques, abstract paintings, and Eames furniture and prototypes, which Ray grouped into compositions and rearranged continually (Burke et al., 2018). Two Hans Hofmann paintings that first hung on the living room wall were later suspended horizontally from the ceiling (Burke et al., 2018). The Eameses called this profusion “functioning decoration,” and they insisted that they collected objects because each demonstrated good design, honest use of materials, or skilled craft (Burke et al., 2018). McCoy observed that they were the first to fill the spare framework of modern architecture with rich content, Paul Goldberger compared the interior to a Joseph Cornell box, and Robert Venturi joked that they had reinvented good Victorian clutter (Burke et al., 2018).

In 1955 they made House: After Five Years of Living, a short film built entirely from still photographs Charles took over several years, recording specific details such as butterflies pressed between panes of glass and the photographic panel of trees on the facade, with a score by Elmer Bernstein (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, n.d.). The house was a favored backdrop for fashion shoots in the 1950s and 1960s, including for Vogue (Eames House, 2026).

After Charles and Ray

Charles Eames died on August 21, 1978. Ray continued the work of the office, then closed it and devoted herself to securing its legacy, donating 1.5 million two-dimensional items, including 750,000 prints and photographs, to the Library of Congress. She died on August 21, 1988, ten years to the day after Charles (Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, n.d.-a). The City of Los Angeles designated the house, studio, and grounds Historic-Cultural Monument No. 381 on July 15, 1988, and ownership passed to Charles’s daughter, Lucia (Burke et al., 2018). In 2004 Lucia and her five children established the Charles and Ray Eames House Preservation Foundation, and on September 20, 2006, the Secretary of the Interior designated the house a National Historic Landmark (Burke et al., 2018). In 2011 the contents of the living room were reassembled at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as the centerpiece of the exhibition California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way (Eames House, 2026). Lucia Eames died in 2014, and her children became the foundation’s board (Eames House, 2026).

Conservation

Since 2011 the Getty Conservation Institute has worked with the foundation at the house, conducting environmental monitoring, condition assessments of the contents, and investigations of materials including the Cemesto panels (Getty Conservation Institute, n.d.). The partnership produced a Conservation Management Plan, published in 2018 and released by the Getty in April 2019 (Eames House, 2026). The plan follows the values-based methodology of the Australian conservation planner James Semple Kerr and the principles of the Burra Charter, which calls for doing as much as necessary to care for a place and as little as possible otherwise (Burke et al., 2018). The plan treats the house, its contents, and its landscape as a single place, and it identifies the collection assembled over the Eameses’ lifetimes as intrinsic to the site’s significance (Burke et al., 2018). It received a Preservation Design Award from the California Preservation Foundation in 2019 and a Modernism in America award from Docomomo US in 2020 (Getty Conservation Institute, n.d.).

The Palisades Fire

The Palisades Fire broke out on January 7, 2025, and within two days had spread across more than 15,000 acres toward the house. The foundation removed a small number of objects and evacuated, and observers worried in particular about the surrounding eucalyptus, whose bark and oils make them highly flammable (Hill, 2025). The house survived. Galerie reported that it escaped serious damage largely because hundreds of trees near the property had been felled the year before, though the interiors suffered extensive smoke damage (Waddoups, 2025). After a five-month restoration, the house reopened in July 2025, and the studio opened to the public for the first time (Waddoups, 2025).

The reopening coincided with the launch of the Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, led by the Eameses’ five grandchildren, with Adrienne Luce as executive director and the former Vitra chief design officer Eckart Maise as its first board member from outside the family (Waddoups, 2025). The foundation began implementing the Conservation Management Plan with new urgency after the fire, under the direction of Lucia Dewey Atwood, and announced a program called Eames Architecture devoted to the couple’s work in prefabricated housing (Waddoups, 2025).

Influence

Entenza required that each Case Study house be capable of duplication. Few, if any, became replicable prototypes, and the best known, the Eames House and Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House among them, are singular designs fitted to their sites (Burke et al., 2018). The Eames and Entenza houses were the first in the program to adopt industrial materials and construction methods fully, and they mark the program’s shift toward the steel-and-glass houses of the 1950s (Burke et al., 2018). The program reached architects abroad through Arts & Architecture, which circulated internationally. The historian Reyner Banham recalled seeing pages from the magazine pinned above drafting tables in London architecture offices in the mid-1950s, directly shaping the drawings beneath them. The Getty’s plan identifies the Eames House as perhaps the most internationally recognized of all the Case Study houses (Burke et al., 2018). The 1989 exhibition Blueprints for Modern Living at the Museum of Contemporary Art renewed interest in the program and in modernism across Southern California in the 1990s (Burke et al., 2018).

References

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (n.d.). House after five years of living [Film catalog record]. https://bampfa.org/oskicat/house-after-five-years-living

Burke, S., Somerville, J., Ostergren, G., Matarese, L., & McCoy, C. (2018). Eames House conservation management plan. Getty Conservation Institute. https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/eames_cmp.pdf

Charles & Ray Eames Foundation. (n.d.-a). Charles & Ray biography. https://eamesfoundation.org/charles-ray/biography/

Charles & Ray Eames Foundation. (n.d.-b). History & legacy. https://eamesfoundation.org/eames-house/history/

Eames House. (2026). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 25, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_House

Eames Office. (n.d.). Case Study House #8. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/case-study-house-8/

Getty Conservation Institute. (n.d.). Eames House Conservation Project. https://www.getty.edu/projects/eames-house-conservation/

Hill, J. (2025, January 9). Eames House threatened by Palisades Fire (updated). World-Architects. https://world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/headlines/eames-house-threatened-by-palisades-fire-updated

Historic Resources Group & National Park Service. (2005). Eames House [National Historic Landmark nomination]. National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/69014eb9-9eb2-491a-910e-a3e9d3414a58

Papineau, K. K. (n.d.). Eames House. In G. Esperdy & K. Kingsley (Eds.), SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians; University of Virginia Press. https://sah-archipedia.org/node/49186

Waddoups, R. (2025, July 17). The Eames House reopens after wildfires, launches new foundation. Galerie. https://galeriemagazine.com/eames-house-reopens-launches-foundation/