Stripping away the nonessentials, Charles Eames charted a new course for American design with his now-classic lounge chair

One hundred years after his birth, Charles Eames has earned a seat of honor in American design.

Countless school children pulled up his colorful Fiberglas and plastic chairs to the cafeteria table at lunchtime. The harried dad of the cartoon terror Dennis the Menace took refuge in his Eames lounge chair and ottoman. On the TV sitcom Frasier, the worldly psychiatrist also took his ease in a lounger, an elegant counterpoint to his father’s shabby recliner.

“It improves the quality of every day life to have good design around you,” said Peter Loughrey, a longtime collector. “At various times, my home has been all Eames – lighting, everything.”

Founder of Los Angeles Modern Auctions (“LAMA”), Loughrey sits in an Eames 670, a model first manufactured by Herman Miller in 1958 and the chair favored by Frasier. Over the years, he has owned several of the iconic sets, in which sublimely comfortable leather upholstery – often compared to a well-worn baseball mitt – is served up in curved plywood shells with rosewood veneer mounted on metal pedestals with four-pronged bases.

“The more I live with it, the more I see it as one of the great designs of the 20th century,” he said.

In the mid-20th century, Americans were just beginning to awake to the spare, lean designs initiated by Europeans, including Eames’ friend and collaborator, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Eames became the first – and arguably only – celebrity furniture designer. The Eames lounge chair, priced at $404 plus $174 for the companion ottoman, was introduced in 1956 by host Arlene Francis on NBC’s Home, which later became The Today Show.

“He brought an entirely new look to the United States and to the masses,” said John Sollo of Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, N.J. “Eames looked forward when other American designers were stuck in the 1930s.”

Charles Ormond Eames Jr. was born in St. Louis on June 17, 1907. When he was 14 he worked as a part-time laborer for a steelmaker, where he learned about engineering and dreamed about becoming an architect. His studies at Washington University in Missouri were cut short when he was booted for his strong modernist views.

That rejection didn’t deter Eames from work or life. He married his college sweetheart in 1929, and in 1930 they had a daughter, Lucia – his only child and today the keeper of the family flame. He set up an architecture practice and moved to Michigan to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become head of the Industrial Design department.

In 1941, Eames divorced and married Ray Kaiser, a weaving student at Cranbrook. They moved to California, where the tall, classically handsome Charles and the petite, pony-tailed Ray would spend the rest of their days on a quest for perfect designs in which materials, form and function converged seamlessly.

“If they bought a figure of a bird, it wasn’t because they collected birds,” said Bern Styburski, director of the Eames Foundation. “It was because that bird had ideal balance and made the best use of the piece of wood it was carved from.”

Prices for Eames pieces reached their zenith in the 1990s, when LAMA auctioned a chair designed with Saarinen for an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art for $129,000, eclipsing the previous Eames record of $27,000.

“Only six of the chairs were made and we found one in a basement in Michigan,” Loughrey recalled.

But prices have declined since then, especially for pieces in less than tip-top shape, and have only recently begun to rebound. In 1988, LAMA began selling examples of the lounge chair and ottoman, manufactured by Herman Miller since 1958, for an average price of $2,500. Loughrey said collectors can expect to pay that figure today.

“His molded Fiberglas and plastic chairs are still incredibly well priced,” he said. “You can own a piece of groundbreaking design in a great color palette for less than $100.”

Eames’ accessibility is winning him a growing circle of admirers as interest in mid-century design grows, noted Sollo, whose book Collecting Modern: A Guide to Midcentury Studio Furniture and Ceramics, co-authored with David Rago, depicts an Eames lounge chair and ottoman on the cover.

“It’s not fun to collect things if you can’t find them,” he said.

Eames’ molded plywood children’s chairs are tantalizingly elusive. In the late 1940s, the designer showed up with stacks of the squat, four-legged seats with T-backs. But they quickly became scarce due to two design elements Eames didn’t foresee.

“After the kids got older, parents used them as step stools,” Loughrey said. “They also are the perfect size to fit in a standard trash can, so they got thrown away.”
He estimates a chair that fetched $1,500 in 1988 would bring at least $10,000 today.

Eames’ storage units are also in demand. In 2000, Loughrey handled a storage unit with the same grid style and colorful blue and red panels as the designer’s home. It brought $70,700 at auction, still a record price for that particular form.
One of the most unusual pieces to come to light is the IBM kiosk the Eamses designed for the 1964 World’s Fair, a colorful, inviting space decorated with heraldic flags on poles. A worker who helped dismantle the kiosk and kept it for more than 40 years recently consigned it at LAMA, where it is expected to fetch $80,000 in the company’s Oct. 14 sale.

“You would need a big room to display it,” Loughrey said. “But it would definitely be a conversation piece.”