Living Room
Charles and Ray sitting on the lounge chair and ottoman their living room
Photographed by Hap Johnson in July 1970 © 2026 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.
The living room as it was left by Charles and Ray
Photographed by Chris Mottalini in 2025 © 2026 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.
The alcove in the living room
Photographed by Chris Mottalini in 2025 © 2026 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.
Architectural rendering of the living room by Abby Lopez
The living room c. 1970
© 2026 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.
The living room was the heart of the Eames House—the best expression of the "background for life and work" that Charles and Ray intended their home to be. It was designed as a double-height box emphasizing volume, ideal for gathering, entertaining, working, and rearranging the space to support changing needs. Warm elements like the tallowwood paneling and collected objects stand out against the double-height exposed steel ceiling, giving the room its distinctive character.
On this page, explore the architectural features and construction of the living room through descriptions, primary documents, and interactive models. To explore each model, click component parts to expand or contract them and click and drag to rotate views. Note that elements may take a few seconds to load.
Stucco Panels
Large stucco panels on the Eames House represent one of its most iconic features—color blocks painted white, blue, beige, orange, and black offering a sense of play to both residence and studio. The large white stucco panel at the living room also crucially curates views in and out, while providing a subtle shield from the sun's position at the hottest point of the day. While this panel may look simple from the exterior, its internal composition showcases a fascinating use of a variety of off-the-shelf parts. Explore more through the catalogs and model below.
Truscon Ferroboard is the primary structure of the Eames House's roof, but it was also rotated vertically to become the main structural steel component of the large stucco panels
Metal lath was added to the stucco to create a frame for the wet material to hold on to as it dried
1931 Medusa Waterproof White Portland Cement advertisement for a more traditional use of stucco
West Wall
The west wall features a multi-layered composition that displays true ingenuity at taking modular components and configuring them into something entirely new. In particular, the tallowwood wall actually originated as tongue and groove flooring, which Charles and Ray turned vertically as wall paneling to provide, as they put it, "something to nail into." Click on the parts below to see how they come together.
