Collection: Charles & Ray Eames

Charles & Ray Eames - The Most Influential Partnership in the History of Design

At Deszine Talks, the Charles & Ray Eames collection occupies a category of its own. No other partnership in the history of 20th-century design produced a body of work so technically ambitious, so formally inventive, and so genuinely beloved by the people who live with it. From the moulded plywood of the LCW to the enveloping leather of the Eames Lounge Chair, every piece in this collection carries the unmistakable signature of two minds who believed, without reservation, that good design was a natural right not a luxury reserved for the few.

Charles Eames (1907–1978) trained as an architect in St. Louis before a fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan changed the direction of his life. It was there, in 1940, that he met Ray Kaiser (1912–1988) a painter, visual artist, and textile designer who had studied under Hans Hofmann in New York and brought to the partnership a sensibility for colour, pattern, and surface that Charles alone could not have supplied. They married in 1941 and established their studio in Venice, California, launching one of the most productive creative collaborations the design world has ever seen.

Their breakthrough came in 1940, when Charles and fellow Cranbrook student Eero Saarinen won first prize in MoMA’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition with a proposal for moulded plywood shells shaped to the contours of the human body. The technology to manufacture these compound curves did not yet exist — so they built it. Working in their Venice house with a self-made device they called the “Eames Kazam! Machine”, they spent years perfecting the process of bonding and moulding plywood into three-dimensional shells capable of distributing weight and flexing with the body in ways that no prior seating technology could achieve.

What followed was a two-decade explosion of invention: plywood furniture, fibreglass shells, aluminium frames, wire mesh, storage systems, and eventually the piece that stands as perhaps the most recognised chair in the world. Their work was never merely aesthetic. Every formal decision every curve, every material choice, every joint detail was driven by a relentless investigation of how things are actually made and how people actually live. “The details,” Charles famously said, “are not the details. They make the design.”

Signature Pieces in This Collection

• Eames Lounge Chair & Ottoman (670 & 671) - Designed in 1956 and introduced on NBC television by Arlene Francis with Charles Eames himself, the Lounge Chair is the definitive expression of mid-century luxury. Its three moulded plywood shells seat, back, and headrest are each veneered in rich rosewood or walnut and cushioned with thick, button-tufted leather pads in black, tan, or cognac. The base is a five-star polished aluminium swivel pedestal. Charles described it as having “the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt” furniture that invites rather than impresses. The matching Ottoman completes one of the most resolved objects in the history of seating. A lifetime investment and an undeniable statement in any room.
• LCW – Lounge Chair Wood - Designed in 1945 and voted the greatest design of the 20th century by Time magazine, the LCW was the first commercially successful chair to use compound-moulded plywood for both seat and backrest shells. The two shells are connected by a rubber shock mount that allows independent flex an engineering solution that also became a formal signature. Low-slung, organic, and democratic, the LCW remains one of the most studied objects in the history of industrial design.
• DSW – Dining Side Chair Wood - Introduced in 1950 as part of the Plastic Chair series, the DSW brought the Eameses’ fibreglass shell technology to the dining chair format. The one-piece fibreglass shell later produced in polypropylene was the first mass-produced plastic chair shell in history, available in a palette of colours that Ray Eames curated personally. Its solid wood dowel leg base gives it a warmth that the metal-legged versions cannot match. Available across the widest range of shell colours and is equally at home at a dining table or deployed as a single accent chair.
• DAW – Dining Armchair Wood - The armchair variant of the DSW, the DAW pairs the same fibreglass or polypropylene shell with a solid wood dowel base and adds gracefully curved arms that extend the shell’s organic language. Wider and more generous in proportion than the DSW, it is particularly effective at the head of a dining table or as a singular accent chair in a reading corner or home office.
• Eames Plastic Chair (RAR – Rocking Armchair Rod)- The rocking version of the plastic shell chair, set on a wire rod base with solid wood rockers, is one of the most visually surprising pieces in the Eames catalogue. The RAR combines industrial materials steel rod, fibreglass with the ancient domestic comfort of a rocking chair, producing a tension between the modern and the familiar that is distinctly Eames in its sensibility. Ideal as a nursery chair, a reading chair, or simply as the most characterful seat in a room.
• Eames Compact Sofa - Designed in 1954, the Compact Sofa brought Eames formal language to upholstered seating. Low-profile, tightly upholstered in leather or fabric, and set on a slender aluminium or wood base, it is the antithesis of the oversized, overupholstered sofa a piece that takes up little visual space while providing generous, supportive seating. A masterwork of disciplined proportion.
• Cushions & Accessories - Seat pads and cushions in leather and fabric selected to complement the shell geometries and material palette of the Eames collection, adding warmth and comfort without obscuring the formal clarity of each piece.

The Material Revolution Behind Every Piece

The Eameses were, before anything else, inventors. Their furniture was the output of a sustained investigation into materials and manufacturing processes that had no precedent in the furniture industry. Moulded plywood had existed for decades used in aircraft and prosthetics during World War II but no one had successfully formed it into the compound curves required for a comfortable chair shell. The Eameses solved this problem through years of patient, iterative experimentation, ultimately developing a manufacturing process that allowed them to produce organic, body-conforming shells in the tens of thousands.

When plywood met its limits it could not be formed into the deeper curves of the DAX or DSX shells they turned to fibreglass, becoming the first designers to apply the material commercially to furniture. Fibreglass allowed one-piece shells of almost unlimited curvature, available in colours mixed under Ray’s direction: Elephant Hide Grey, Seafoam Green, Greige, La Fonda White. These were not incidental colour choices. Ray Eames regarded colour as a structural element of the design as load-bearing, in its own way, as the shell itself.

The aluminium and wire bases, the shock mounts, the dowel legs each was developed to solve a specific structural or ergonomic problem and each became, in solving it, a formal element of lasting beauty. This is the discipline that separates Eames design from mere style: every visual decision is also a functional decision, and the two are inseparable.

Why Deszine Talks for Charles & Ray Eames?

How to Style Eames in Your Interior

The Eames Lounge Chair & Ottoman is a room-defining piece position it as a solitary anchor beside a floor lamp or in a corner with clear sightlines, giving the walnut veneer and leather cushions space to be read in full. Pair with a low Sofa in a complementary leather tone and ground the composition with a Carpet in a warm, undyed weave. The Lounge Chair sits equally well in a living room, a home library, or a considered home office.

DSW and DAW chairs are inherently social use them in multiples around a dining surface or Study Table, mixing shell colours for the kind of curated eclecticism that Ray Eames herself practised. Add Leather Cushions or Fabric Cushions to the DSW for extended comfort, and finish the room with a Mirror to amplify the visual energy of the shell palette.

Explore More Mid-Century & Scandinavian Design Icons

The Eames collection sits at the heart of the mid-century modern canon and finds natural companions in the broader world of Scandinavian and international modernism. Discover the organic shell mastery of Arne Jacobsen whose Egg and Swan were conceived in the same decade as the Eames Lounge Chair. Explore the structural honesty of Børge Mogensen or the ergonomic mastery of Bruno Mathsson. The handcrafted Swedish warmth of Carl Malmsten offers a counterpoint in natural wood and linen. For the full sweep of what we curate, begin with our Furniture collection or let our customers guide you through our Best Sellers cohesive, considered, lasting.