) was groundbreaking due to its fibreglass reinforced plastic seat. ) costs just £59 Made of steel arches and copper 'leaves', this original (left, from nest.co.uk) was designed by Henningsen 58 years ago for Copenhagen restaurant Langelinie Pavilion, where versions still hang. It is available for £5,445. The lookalike (right) is available for just £200 from vertigo-interiors.co.uk Inspired by street lights, Castiglioni's arched 1962 design (left, conranshop.co.uk) featured in the 1971 Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. The designer version can be bought for £1,425. The lookalike (right) is available for just £195 from iconiclights.co.uk Created in 1958 in Copenhagen, this chair (left) was made famous by reality TV show Big Brother (conranshop.co.uk). It would set you back £5,004, but the lookalike (right) is available from pash-living.co.uk for just £399 This fun shade (left, from cloudberryliving.co.uk) was created by the Danish designer in the Sixties and named in homage to the 'flower power' movement.
) was created by Charles' wife Ray in 1953 to encourage children to hang up their belongings tidily. It can be bought for £199 for a snip at just £29 The Irish designer's work (left, from aram.co.uk) was hugely popular in stylish French homes in the early 20th century. The original design can be bought for £489, but the lookalike version (right) can be bought for just £60 from vertigo-interiors.co.uk Now over 60 years old, it was created to allow parents to sit in comfort and rock their babies to sleep . Italian-American Bertoia said this chair, from the Fifties, looked like it was 'made of air, like sculpture'. The original (left) is available from conranshop.co.uk for £1,668, while the lookalike (right) can be picked up for just £69 from stonebutterfly.co.uk With slats to let light through, this stylish bench was created by the American designer in 1946. The original (pictured) is available from nest.co.uk for £538 Charles Eames designed this leather and plywood chair for his friend, Hollywood film director Billy Wilder, in 1956.
The original design (pictured) is available from wharfside.co.uk, for £5,100 The design was intended to resemble the 'warmth, familiarity and comfort of a well-worn baseball mitt'. The lookalike (pictured) can be picked up for £749 from pash-living.co.uk Invented by Japanese-American sculptor Noguchi in the Forties, the glass top balances on two solid wooden legs. The original design (pictured) is available from nest.co.uk for £1,323 While originals are still available thanks to the table's sturdy construction, a lookalike version (pictured) is also available from stonebutterfly.co.uk for just £145 Created in 1960, this was the first chair made from a single piece of plastic. Meanwhile, the lookalike can be bought for £59 from pash-living.co.uk This versatile unit from 1967 features at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. , while the lookalike (right) costs £85 from next.co.uk This iconic clock brought modern design into Fifties American homes. for £239, but the lookalike (right)will set you back just £44.99, from vertigo-interiors.co.uk
Charles and Ray Eames "were as careful with their words as they were with their designs," says author and scholar Daniel Ostroff, whose latest book, "An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, and Speeches," is a compilation of material from 1941 to 1986.The book is illustrated with rarely seen drawings and photographs, and about 70% of the collected texts are previously unpublished"They were very good at coming up with one-liners, such as 'Take your pleasure seriously.'" What makes the Eameses work enduring, he adds, is "the applicability of their ideas to the problems of today and tomorrow." Charles and Ray even teamed with Alcoa to produce a solar-powered toy. "Who else was thinking about that in 1959?" Ostroff, also the author of "Modern Classic: The Eames Plastic Chair," "Eames + Valastro: Design in the Life of an American Family" and "Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection," is a veteran Hollywood producer too. On Saturday, he will give a lecture, titled "An Affection for Objects: New Insights Into the Work of Charles and Ray Eames," at the Los Angeles Modernism Show.
He will also be speaking about the designers at the Neutra VDL House in Silver Lake on May 23, at UCLA's Royce Hall on May 28 and at Boomerang for Modern in San Diego on May 30.Charles and Ray Eames worked in Venice and lived in an early prefab steel-and-glass box house of their own design in Pacific Palisades. How did L.A. influence the couple's work? There was nothing about Los Angeles that influenced the look of their designs. Though many are attractive, they never were about "style" or the "appearance of things," nor were they regimented about the materials that they used.Southern California did give them the opportunity to test their idea of ultimate service and performance. For example, furniture that could be used indoors and out. In doing this book, I learned that they wanted a weather-resistant finish on their molded plywood. They again explored this idea with molded fiberglass, and when they first released the Eames aluminum group, they called it the Indoor Outdoor group.
At one time you owned 175 Eames-designed pieces. What are the holy grails? I prized the examples where I could see their minds at work, addressing a problem in a straightforward way, such as a simple piece of bent steel that served as the torsion bar on a tilt mechanism. Right now, the holy grails are plywood pieces from 1946 to 1948 and molded fiberglass from 1950. I still own three vintage upholstered wire rocking chairs, which I particularly admire. Those haven't been made since 1967.Collectors view vintage Eames pieces as the most desirable. What would the designers think?As Ray put it in 1975, "that's very nice, to make one thing. But to be able to keep the quality in mass production is the only reason we've been working so hard … to figure a way the hundredth and the five hundredth and the thousandth would have the original character." At LAX and the Apple store in Santa Monica, you can sit on new Eames chairs; they are good design in every sense of the word. I hope collectors will come to appreciate the contemporary iterations as much as customers do.
What role did Ray play in the Eames legend?Charles once said, "When the camera is on me, I'm the know-it-all of the century. With Ray it is much simpler; Charles rarely missed an opportunity to credit Ray as being "equally responsible for everything that comes out of the office." She was his intellectual equal, and that shines through in her texts and in the covers she designed for Arts & Architecture magazine.Whom would you cast in an Eames movie?Let's make three: Theo James and Alicia Vikander as Charles and Ray when they first moved to Los Angeles. During the daytime, Charles was working in set design at MGM, while Ray was shaping molded plywood. On weekends, they are broke and holding hands, looking wistfully at the tools in the windows at the Sears in Santa Monica. At the climax, the U.S. Navy gives them a contract for their lifesaving leg splint.Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would be Charles and Ray when they wowed the citizens of Moscow in 1959 with their "Glimpses of the USA" multi-screen film, then gave Herman Miller the bestselling lounge chair.