California Houses As Celebrities

This column was originally written by Andrew Ferren.

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Perhaps the most clichéd Los Angeles tourist activity is the curbside ogling of celebrity homes. But take away the famous residents, and Los Angeles is still the ultimate showplace of American dream houses.

With legions of architects and Hollywood set designers equally adept at building a Southern plantation or a medieval Transylvanian castle, it’s no wonder that some streets are lined with English Tudors and Mexican haciendas that somehow look more authentic than anything you’d find in Chichester or Chihuahua.

But for a handful of early- and mid-20th-century American and European émigré architects, the city offered an opportunity to create a distinctly “Californian” house that would suit (and perhaps even mold) the families who lived in them.

Rather than faking the grandeur of faux chateaux or other historical models, they took humble materials like clinker bricks, poured concrete and redwood shingles, and combined them with then-novel materials like Formica, linoleum and acres of plate glass windows that brought the outdoors inside and inspired a fresh, informal approach to living that eventually spread around the globe.

The Eames house, also known as Case Study House No. 8, offers a bit of time travel. Built by the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames in 1949, it was part of a program to design intelligent, affordable housing in the postwar era. The house itself is rarely opened to the public, but the grounds are open by appointment.

Since the house is mostly clad in glass and is just one room deep, viewing it is like looking into a diorama of the Eameses’ casual California lifestyle, complete with examples of their iconic furniture designs and artwork amid overgrown houseplants and Ray’s collections of ceramics and colored glass still on display in the kitchen.

Sheltered in a eucalyptus-shaded meadow that seems to float above the ocean in Pacific Palisades, the house is built entirely from pre-fabricated parts ordered out of catalogues. The property includes two aligned rectangular structures separated by a small patio.

One of these structures is the studio where the Eameses once worked; today it houses the offices of the Eames Foundation. Here you’ll be greeted and given information about the house and the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames before being sent off into the meadow to explore on your own.