When you walk inside the Eames House, high on a Pacific Palisades bluff overlooking the ocean, you notice its open layout, flexible spaces, bright colors, and building materials: glass, steel, plywood, and even an early fiberglass.
The breeze comes in through the open sliding glass doors, and you can smell the eucalyptus trees behind which the house is tucked. A grassy meadow sweeps from the structure to the edge of the bluff, which teems with birds and other wildlife and changes with the seasons.
Ray and Charles Eames built this home in 1949 as part of the Case Study House Program, an influential postwar effort to design affordable modern housing. One of the most intact Case Study houses remaining, it has become a pilgrimage site for architects and lovers of modern architecture.
“On the one hand, Charles and Ray chose to extend the idea of mass production as their approach to this challenge, making a cube of steel and glass, and drawing from a catalog of materials to build a house inexpensively. This is still a timely challenge,” said Lucia Atwood, one of Ray and Charles’s five grandchildren. She is also a board member of the Eames Foundation and, along with her siblings, a passionate steward of the home.
“But on the other, what were the intentional qualities that make it so special?” she said. “Experiencing the seasons and the light as it moves through the day, being part of nature, seeing the views they emphasized with the placement of glass and solids, and how the pair curated the interior furnishings. Those fundamental intangibles are felt by visitors.”
Despite the innovative use of materials, the house, where the couple resided for the rest of their lives, feels simple and honest. Its location on the site was designed to preserve and make the most of the natural area around it, rather than to dominate it. “Also, it’s so livable, embracing those core needs that we share as humans—even those we don’t realize we have,” said Atwood. “We all feel the intentionality of their choices.”
But over the decades of sunshine and ocean breezes, the building began to wear. Some of the innovative materials were not aging well. Atwood and her siblings hesitated to make repairs that might alter the essence of the house. In 2011 they asked the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) to assist their architects, Escher GuneWardena, with some of the more challenging issues, and in 2012 the GCI recommended creating a conservation management plan to guide this and future work in a way that retained the dwelling’s special character and qualities and would keep it alive.
“We had been told up until then that we needed to, essentially, hermetically seal the house up to preserve it,” said Atwood. “It was gratifying to talk to so many experts at the Getty, especially GCI scientist Shin Maekawa, who validated a more nuanced goal: to provide visitors with a visceral experience of how the house embraced Charles and Ray’s living and working. He and the other team members understood that this is a holistic conservation project: we need to conserve all elements—tangible and intangible, even if they appear to be in conflict with each other.”
In other words, find ways to keep the doors open, the breezes flowing, and the sunlight shining, even if traditional conservation practice would try to control the environment.
“The family very much wanted to preserve a sense of how the house was inhabited,” said Gail Ostergren, a research specialist in the GCI’s Buildings and Sites department. “They were very aware of the experimental nature of the house and the way their grandparents lived there.”
A conservation management plan identifies what is significant about a place and develops policies to manage and sustain its significance. This approach is commonly used for older cultural heritage sites, and the GCI wanted to promote its use for modern architecture. As the inaugural project of the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative, the GCI began a rigorous analysis of the site, its significance, and its challenges.
The plan had to consider the house, its contents, and the surrounding landscape. Far from austere modernism, the home’s interior features a riot of texture and color. Nearly every surface is covered with idiosyncratic objects that Ray loved—among them toys, rocks, candles, and flowers.
“Things I took for granted needed to be codified in the plan,” said Atwood. “For instance, we wrote a manual on how to arrange bouquets the way Ray would have.” There was also the row of eucalyptus trees alongside the house, planted in the 1880s by developer and entrepreneur Abbot Kinney (who founded nearby Venice). “Landscapes are living—they grow and die. The plan acknowledges the significance of those trees, even as they may need to be removed to allow for healthy growth of the remaining trees.”
Even the views from the house need to be conserved, whenever possible, along with the meadow that becomes verdant in the spring, attracting generations of animals. “Ray loved to watch the deer, even when they ate the flowers,” said Atwood.
In 2011 the Eames Foundation loaned the entire contents of the living room to LACMA for the exhibition California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” That created the opportunity for the foundation to undertake some urgently needed repairs.
GCI conservators and scientists worked with the foundation’s architectural consultants to conduct a paint study, contribute to repairs to the steel windows and doors, advise on a roof replacement, and after extensive studies, guide the replacement of the living room’s deteriorated vinyl tile floor with a new system that included a vapor barrier designed to prevent moisture from damaging the new tiles.
Conservators also investigated and advised on the cleaning and treating of the living room paneling. They focused on keeping the traces of Ray and Charles’s life in the house, including the marks that potted plants had made against the wall and the rectangular traces of framed paintings, darker than the surrounding areas.
The conservation management plan takes into account the significance of these traces, extending the lived memory of Ray and Charles and how they inhabited the special place they created.
“We’ve all seen how memories evaporate over the years,” said Atwood. “What I appreciate as a steward and a granddaughter is the role of the conservation management plan in helping future stewards not lose sight of what’s significant when addressing new, as well as ongoing, challenges. It is comforting to know that this plan will guide future stewards, as well as our upcoming conservation projects.”
