Eames House Could be the Most Beautiful Home in Los Angeles

Two boxes face a meadow. They are made of industrial material, including a black-painted metal structural grid and panels of glass, stucco, metal and various compounds. There are no turrets, no sweeping roofs, no bay windows, no picture windows. There is just a simple set of spaces contained by a logical structure and placed almost nonchalantly at the edge of an unwatered meadow.

The Eames House is quite possibly the most beautiful house in Los Angeles. Designed by husband and wife Charles and Ray Eames in 1949 and now inhabited by one of their grandsons and his family, the house is a statement about the plainness of man-made things and their beauty, and about the uncatchable forms of nature revealed through the framing devices of man.

Charles and Ray Eames dedicated their lives to such pursuits. They were the first designers to realize the potential of molded plywood, using it for fluid, comfortable chairs that could be easily reproduced. During the 1950s and 1960s, they designed hundreds of pieces of furniture, and each of their designs was an essay in how technology can be used to create sensuous and affordable forms. The Eames House takes this exploration to the level of architecture.

Their home on a cul-de-sac in Pacific Palisades was built as a “case study house” for Arts & Architecture magazine. Their aim was to show the public that affordable and beautiful houses could be built by applying the construction methods and materials of Los Angeles’ wartime industrial base to the making of domestic environments.

In this case, the Eameses had a truckload of steel H-beams and web trusses delivered to a eucalyptus grove and meadow sloping off to a cliff and a view of the Pacific. Their original idea was to build a bridge facing the ocean, but they quickly decided to rearrange their modular building materials into two simple volumes placed so as to leave the expanse of the meadow untouched.

The larger box contains a two-story living space and two bedrooms placed on top of an eat-in kitchen and bathroom; the smaller volume, separated from the house by a sheltered patio, is a loft-like studio space, a kind of glorified garage for tinkering on all of their designs.

The construction and simple arrangements of space gave them a grid within which they then placed a composition of planes that ranged from clear glass to translucent panels to brightly painted walls. The result is a face to the house that from the outside looks like a Mondrian painting, while from the inside it offers framed views of trees, ocean or the meadow. The shadows of nature play against this grid, making a continuously changing display of soft forms and colors. On the inside, the Eameses shared their spaces with an ever-changing collection of pebbles, Japanese combs, kachina dolls, toy trains and whatever other objects caught their eye, all carefully arranged to mirror the absolute conviction with which they had ordered the views to and from their house in the overall design of the walls.

The beauty of the Eames House lies in what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t hog the spectacular view of the ocean with big windows that would overwhelm the inside. It doesn’t try to make a lot of different spaces for particular uses. It doesn’t try to look like a house. All it tries to do is to make you feel as if you are part of a three-dimensional composition in which everything has its place, and it also makes you realize the innate beauty of each thing. And it succeeds.