A guided video tour of the Eames Archive
Charles and Ray Eames' granddaughter Llisa Demetrios takes us into their creative process.
A few months ago, Eli and I drove to Richmond, California, and walked into a building that most people never get to enter.
The Eames Archive.
Inside, we were met by Llisa Demetrios — Charles and Ray Eames’ granddaughter, and chief curator of the Eames Institute. Llisa has spent her life inside this collection. She knows these objects not just as artifacts, but as family.
And she agreed to take us on a tour.
What you'll see in this video is rare. Llisa walks you through the early prototypes — including the very first Eames chair — and explains the decades of iteration that most people never hear about. You'll see Charles' cartoons drawn for his high school yearbook, Ray's paintings from her time studying in New York, personal letters, wartime leg splints, the lounge chair in its earliest form, and rooms full of objects that changed how the world thinks about design.
One of the things Llisa said that I keep coming back to: her grandparents never called anything a failure. They only called it a misconception. And if you asked them whether a great idea came in a flash, they’d say yes — a 30-year flash.
That's the Eames philosophy in two sentences.
Charles and Ray Eames are arguably the most influential designers of the 20th century. Their chairs are in millions of homes. Their ideas about function, craft, and constraint still shape how designers work today. And yet so much of their process — the early experiments, the wrong turns, the letters between them — has never been widely seen.
This video is our attempt to change that.
We’d love for you to watch it, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to the Design Better YouTube channel. That’s where we’ll be sharing more of what we discovered on our visit — and more conversations like this one.
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Learn more about the Eames Institute and schedule a tour.
Bonus photos from our visit
