With More Than 40,000 Objects, the New Eames Institute Will Show Much More Than Just Chairs

You don’t have to look hard to find the work of Charles and Ray Eames. The famous design couple’s molded plastic chairs and low-slung lounges appear in open houses, offices, and your friends’ homes, whether they’re die-hard fans or simply like how the pieces communicate good taste. Reebok released sneakers with Ray’s dot pattern, skate brand Globe put the Eameses’ graphics on a few of their boards, and there was even a loungewear line. These days, their legacy is a little bit here, a little bit there.

But you no longer have to take it in piecemeal. Starting February 14, the Eames Institute will host tours of its brand new headquarters, a converted warehouse in the East Bay town of Richmond, California, that serves as a one-stop shop for all things Eames: a gallery, archive, and workspace with rows of open shelving and flat-file drawers holding a revolving set of the more than 40,000-piece collection owned by the institute. It includes first drafts, polished ideas, and everything in between.

"My mom [Lucia Eames] felt their most important work was the process: how they got to the solution," explains the gallery’s chief curator and Charles’s granddaughter, Llisa Demetrios. "It’s really important to see the iterations and prototyping to understand that they really cared about what a chair would do, as opposed to what a chair would look like. That was a totally different trajectory for design ideas at that time."

Previously, these pieces were scattered between storage facilities and the homes of Charles’s five grandchildren, who come by way of his first wife, Catherine Woermann. The Eames Archives marks the first time these objects—from prototypes of aluminum group office furniture, to the Kazam machine that formed molded plywood chairs, to assemblages of seashells that were referenced in the creation of La Chaise, a sinuous lounge—are being hosted, documented, and considered together. Demetrios will personally guide tours of rotating exhibits on the Eameses’ approach to problem-solving in design, featuring many pieces that have never been shown publicly.

Before the opening of the Richmond facility, the best place to step into the Eameses’ world was by touring their family home in Los Angeles, Case Study House No. 8. In 2019, as it celebrated its 70th birthday, the Eames Institute became a nonprofit with financial backing from Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, with a goal to expand the Eameses reach. In 2022, Demetrios began hosting small, private tours of her mother’s collection of Eames designs and artifacts at her family home, the Eames Ranch, a 72-acre parcel in Petaluma, California, with a farmhouse designed by William Turnbull in 1992. The Eames Archives plans to co-host shows with the ranch , which is undergoing a renovation to create a restorative agriculture program that aligns with the couple’s vision for environmentally conscious design.