Eames Lounge Chair & Ottoman

The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman is the premier chair in American design. This is a chair on display in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. It is a chair about which documentary films have been made, books have been written, and critics have written at length. It is handsome, well-made, perfectly balanced, beautiful, luxurious, elegant, and deeply comfortable. There is no chair extant that can match the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman in style, quality, and enduring sky-high regard.

The Eames made the very first Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman as a gift to legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who they'd noticed had been rigging up makeshift lounge chairs during his shoots to take short naps. The Eames chair was modeled on the angles of Wilder's creations, and by the feel and look of "a well-used first baseman's mitt," according to Charles Eames. The materials of the chair weren't hard to come up with: The Eames' had been champions of molded plywood since the 1940s, when the Navy had commissioned them to use their new material in making stretchers, splints, and glider shells. Charles Eames said his goal for the chair was that it be "a special refuge from the strains of modern living."

And is it ever. The most important (and most surprising, if you're a student of modern chair design) attribute of the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman is that it's comfortable. More than comfortable: luxurious. Even the most brilliant designs of the modern architectural/design movement usually don't last long in the homes of art lovers, because they can't compete with the comfort of a simple armchair or couch. But the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman matches an piece of furniture in the comfort department, and knocks them out of the park when it comes to design. It's a win-win, for the owner and the designers. The Eames wanted you to slip into their chair, "relax" into it. It's an escape hatch from modern anxiety and and a hurried world.

The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman is a generational inheritance. While the chair is responsibly made out of common wood stock and responsibly manufactured with 24 percent recycled material (and is itself 29 percent recyclable), this is a chair you won't be recycling. This is a chair for your children, and your children's children. An unparalleled classic of design, with an unparalleled insistence on comfort and familiarity, it's a family chair that will last a long, long time.

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