Eames Mid-Century Furniture

In 1943, the couple established the Eames Office at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, an address they would work from until 1988. There they explored the possibilities of molded plywood and by 1945, the couple had figured out how to create compound curves in the material. One of their first pieces was a birch child’s chair and stool manufactured by the Molded Plywood Division of Evans Products — production was limited to just 5,000 pieces.

Around the same time, the Eameses were also designing their own house, which they built as a part of the Case Study House Program sponsored by John Entenza of Arts & Architecture. Their goal was to build a house that would be inexpensive to produce and easy to construct. True to this aim, the house’s exterior steel framing went up in about 90 man-hours.

Concurrently, the Eameses continued their short-lived collaboration with Evans Products when they produced about 1,000 LCW (Lounge Chair Wood) chairs. These were followed by a partnership with Herman Miller. One of their most fruitful early projects was the DCM (Dining Chair Metal), a two-piece chair whose plywood sections are secured to a solid-rod chromed frame with rubber mounts.

Molded fiberglass chairs in a variety of bright colors and configurations came next. Around the same time, the couple designed chairs made from sturdy wire mesh, with covers available in leather, vinyl, and fabric by Alexander Girard. And by 1956, the Eameses introduced their Lounge Chair and Ottoman, whose molded rosewood plywood form embraced rich leather upholstery.

Eames tables mirrored the aesthetic of their chairs. The OTW-1 was similar in design to the LCW chair, while the DTW-40 and DTW-1 had foldable and detachable legs respectively so that they could be stored when not in use. Of the Eames tables, the so-called "surfboard table" is probably the most eye-catching. It consists of a narrow black ellipse that sits on a low, wire-rod base.

Other Eames objects included plywood screens from the early 1950s, but the best-known non-table-or-chair objects are probably the storage units, also from the early 1950s. Some of these resemble cubist Mondrian paintings with their rectangular and square blocks of primary colors, open shelves, and natural wood.

The Eames storage units were sophisticated solutions to the mundane adult problem of where to put a lot of stuff. Which is not to say that the Eameses lacked a sense of humor about their work. As Eames aficionado Steve Cabella notes on his website, Eamescollector.com, when one of the larger storage units arrived at a customer’s doorstep fully assembled and packed in an Eames-designed carton, inside were instructions showing the kids of the home on how to convert the carton into a playhouse.

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