Not the One and Only House

The Eames House was built in 1949 from standard factory parts, as a model anyone could copy. It never became a product. This fall, Kettal starts selling the kit, from about $2,800 a square metre.

The Eames House was supposed to be the easy one. In 1945 Charles and Ray Eames, working with Eero Saarinen, drew a steel-and-glass house for a meadow in Pacific Palisades, specified from standard industrial parts that any builder could order. It was a Case Study House, part of a magazine program (Arts & Architecture) whose whole job was to show how to make decent postwar houses cheap and repeatable. Ray said they wanted a design "that people would not have to build stick by stick."

Then the steel took more than two years to arrive. By the time it did, Charles had seen the Mies van der Rohe show at MoMA, and they redrew the house with the same parts, tucked into the hillside instead of floating over it. The frame went up in a day and a half. They moved in on Christmas Eve, 1949. A city inspector reportedly told them, "We decided it isn't a house. We don't know what it is."

It became the best-known house in the program, and it stayed one house. Today a foundation runs it. You visit by reservation, and the inside of the residence is still closed.

This spring, at the Triennale in Milan, the Eames Office and the Barcelona furniture maker Kettal showed the other half of the idea: the Eames Pavilion System. A grid of modules, made to order, and sales start this fall. Press coverage puts one-storey builds at about US$2,800 a square metre, so a 2,000-square-foot house starts somewhere around $520,000, before tax, shipping or the plot. Someone from Kettal comes to look at your site first.

Eames Office creative director Eckart Maise, at the opening: "the Eames house is not the one and only house." It took seventy-seven years and a price list for the catalog house to be in the catalog. The book that came out with the show, The Eames Houses, covers more of them than the one.