Written By: Ben Cosgrove
Some things designed and built by our fellow humans are so much a part of our visual landscape that, even if they haven’t been around forever, it takes an effort of will to imagine a world without them. Several Apple products come to mind. The Brooklyn Bridge. The 1956 Corvette convertible (preferably candy-apple red … but any color will do).
These and so many other marvels of imagination and execution offer us a glimpse of that ideal world where form and function merge into a seamless and occasionally breathtaking whole. They are tools that are works of art. And vice versa.
And then there are those quieter, simpler, but no less-beautiful items (or their knock-offs and imitators) that are also, seemingly, everywhere and that somehow we so seldom really see. We take them for granted not only because they’re ubiquitous, but because they do exactly what they’re meant to do without calling attention themselves.
Case in point: the Eames molded-plywood LCW (“Lounge Chair Wood,” below), with a silhouette so familiar that it might have been there, in our collective field of vision, forever. Considering its organic lines, so pure that they have about them an air of inevitability, the “Eames chair” as it has long been known might have been carved into existence around the same time as, say, the buttes of Monument Valley. In reality, the famed husband and wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames (rhymes with “dreams”) introduced the chair in the 1940s, and followed it up with a slew of other mid-century design and architecture icons, including their leather-and-molded-plywood lounge chair and ottoman; the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair; and their own lovely, perfectly Modernist California home, Eames House (1949).
Few design studios of the past 100 years can lay claim to as many innovations and as many influential creations as the practice that Charles and Ray ran for decades: the celebrated Eames Office. Here, LIFE.com offers a series of pictures many of which were not published in LIFE made in 1950 by photographer Peter Stackpole at the newly built Eames House. Today, the house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is an official National Historic Landmark. Back then, it was just another intriguing design by a man and woman who, in many ways, were literally helping to shape the second half of the 20th century.
As LIFE told its readers in the September 11, 1950 issue, in which some of these pictures first ran:
Charles Eames, whose stark, comfortable chairs in the last five years have made him the best-known U.S. designer of modern furniture and a winner in the Museum of Modern Art furniture competition, recently designed a house and adjoining studio for himself near Santa Monica, Calif. As might be expected of a man whose chief concerns are simplicity, functionalism and economy, Eames’s own house is simply built of steel trusses, bright stucco panels and treat curtained expanses of glass. It is extraordinarily functional, built for a couple that likes to live without servants or cocktail parties and work surrounded by the varied objects that interest them. And when work or contemplation pall, the Eameses have the ocean just across the meadow from their home.
Of the now-legendary 20th-century design object, the Eames chair, which Eames first introduced in 1946, LIFE wrote that its “popularity started slowly, then snowballed until it is now selling at the remarkable rate of 3,000 a month… A vague businessman, Eames does not know how much the chair has made for him… Eames is so interested making the products of his drawing board available at the lowest coast that the modest retail price of his newest chair ($32.50) bothers him [and] he guilty feels that it should sell for less.”
Eames likes to say his job is “the simple one of getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least.” Few men are so earnestly dedicated to their jobs. To feed an insatiable interest in the looks of things, he and his wife take frequent sleeping-bag trips into the surrounding seaside and desert areas collecting weeds, rocks and driftwood whose appearance they want to study. Eames has a distaste for the superfluous that sometimes even affects his speech: “Take chair by wall,” he may invite a visitor. Commented awed movie director Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder, “He even has the guts to sit there and be quiet if he hasn’t anything to say.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Ray Eames at home in California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Charles Eames … earnest, reticent, eternally bow-tied man of 43. Decoration on heating duct at left is a piece of Eames whimsy.”
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Interior view shows living room’s 17-foot-high ceiling, unadorned steel-truss construction, to which Eames clamps lamps for varied lighting effects. He puts up the pilings from an old pier outside the door because he liked their looks. He similarly suspended a Chinese owl kite and toy French horn from the ceiling.”
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Charles and Ray Eames at home in California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Eames House, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: ” Natural designs embodied in Mojave desert plants fascinate Eames, who likes to mount them on the wall of his studio. From them, he says he gets ideas for his own designs.”
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Eames designed chairs, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ray Eames at home in California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: ” New toy, a part of which he is spinning here, was designed by Eames of colored cardboard sections which are easily joined by a child to form odd shapes.”
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Charles and Ray Eames at home in California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Eames chair, 1950
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Eames-designed (and decorated) chair, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Charles Eames with a chair he designed and decorated, California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ray Eames at home in California, 1950.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Exterior view of Eames’ house shows how it nudges into a hillside, is fronted by eucalyptus trees. The studio-office is at right, joined to house by a patio.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
