Charles Eames

Husband and wife Charles and Ray Eames practised across a wide range of disciplines – architecture, film, exhibitions and of course furniture – in execution of a strategy said by Charles to be to “bring the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least”. Cradled in the America of the Depression, their talents flowered in the enterprising spirit and blank canvas of the post-war West Coast of America.

The famed Eames office developed furniture made of plywood, fibreglass, plastic, wire mesh and aluminium and gave rise to a host of iconic products – the plywood Lounge Chair Wood and Dining Chair Wood, the Aluminum Group, the Lounge Chair and Ottoman, and the wire mesh Eiffel Chair. The Lounge Chair was, in Charles’s famous words, designed to have "the warm receptive look of a well used first baseman's mitt." So he nestled supple leather-covered cushions in molded-plywood, veneer-covered forms. Their work was always approachable perhaps because it exhibited not only a curiosity in the material world but also playfulness as a key quality. Their work lacked their contemporaries’ asceticism but radiated warmth even when being hailed as the ‘the most advanced furniture being produced in the world today’.