Anyone Can Now Buy an Eames House—Sort Of

Case Study Home No. 8, the 1949 Pacific Palisades home of designers Ray and Charles Eames, emerged from brainstorms around adaptability and industrial design, with a name as bland as the term "manufactured parts" suggests. The couple’s first vision for the hilly lot, purchased from Arts & Architecture magazine owner John Entenza, was a dramatic, cantilevering glass-and-steel, Eero Saarinen design. But it would get shelved in part due to postwar material shortages. Its replacement, erected via a series of grid-like, deceptively simple steel-framed panels, has since become a world-renowned museum and midcentury mecca.

But this singularity, a physical shrine to the couple’s vision, is better considered a system, a model that the couple would famously revisit and rework throughout their lifetime. (The couple did design a modular home for production, though one was never built.) "For them, architecture was not limited to the buildings you make," says Eames Demetrios, grandson of the couple and current director of the Eames Office. "It includes the systems you make to make things happen."

Now, Ray and Charles’s prefab visions can be the basis for your own project. In partnership with Barcelona-based manufacturer Kettal, the Eames Office has developed the Eames Pavilion System, a modular building kit of parts with a wide range of proposed uses, including a recording studio, backyard office, your own Case Study cabana, or, with some retrofitting, a "fully equipped two-story house." Made of aluminum structural modules, the system, which starts at around $325 a square foot, includes interchangeable roof types, windows, textiles, and other accessories that reference those of the iconic Pacific Palisades property and other Eames residential projects.

The strategy here on the part of Eames Office seems to be part caretaking of the Eames legacy, but also a seamless integration of it into the everyday, as with many of their famous furniture pieces. It is somewhat difficult, though, to imagine a structure that bears the material essence of the couple’s famous midcentury home effortlessly blending in with the mise-en-scène of a backyard, like the Eames lounge might in one’s living room. Is this canonization, then? Or something more commercial?

"Eames fans will love it, but we want to create Eames fans through it," says Demetrios. "You don’t need to know the Eames lounge chair is famous to feel comfortable in it. That’s our attitude here. We’re trying to make something that will enter the ecosystem for decades as a really good solution."

The new system seeks to improve upon the Eameses’ original residential vision and home design, which has had its own preservation challenges over the last 75 years, including issues with deteriorating industrial parts and degradation from salt spray owing to its location on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In the past, the Getty Conservation Institute has been involved in preserving the home. What made the family office willing to consider this sort of offering, Demetrios says, was Kettal’s approach and manufacturing capabilities. Numerous changes were made to the original work—proportions and joints were altered to meet current regulations, as well as sealing, tolerances, and UV resistance, and new materials were utilized—but the selling point was Kettal’s global reach, and a network of installation partners that can guarantee fidelity to the plans.

Vitra’s former chief design officer Eckart Maise spent the last three years working with the Office and Kettal creative director Antonio Navarro to fine-tune the vision. The concept of a systematized, uniquely Eames style of construction grew, in part, out of recent discoveries about the full extent of the couple’s housing designs. In addition to better known projects like the De Pree Home in Michigan, a wood-framed home that used a modular facade, and the work done for director Billy Wilder, which included a blueprint for a home that would largely expand on the off-the-shelf parts and modular design of the Eameses’ home, Maise discovered additional designs hidden in correspondences. This included an unbuilt California dome home and unrealized plans for the Tigrett Family in Tennessee, which ran the manufacturing firm that produced Eames geometric building kits in the ’50s.

Maise found threads of industrialization and modularity between this undiscovered work, and a desire to create a system for cheaper, more accessible construction. He also discovered a self-initiated research project the Eameses launched, which he speculates was inspired by the 1948 low-cost furniture exhibit of the Museum of Modern Art, called the Supermarket House, that was looking into wood-framed modular housing that would have been shipped flat pack and assembled by a local carpenter. The Eameses long-term infatuation with modularity inspired Maise not just in terms of the configuration of the new pavilion system, but also in its effect. "The Eameses took industrial factory components and turned them into something so delicate and so beautiful and so refined that it really touches people," Maise says.

The modular system will debut in April at the Triennale di Milano during Milan Design Week 2026. (Timed to the launch is a new book from Phaidon detailing the Eameses’ complete residential work.) Soon, on a design-world stage, the kit of parts will attempt to show it can champion Ray and Charles’s larger dream of "prefabricated architecture as an adaptable framework for contemporary living," as the Pavilion press release argues. Key to that, says Demetrios, is not to live too much in the past. "It’s not a nostalgia exercise at all," he says. "It’s actually just sort of saying, ‘Wow, isn’t it amazing that so much of this was thought through.’ What we really did is brought it across the finish line, not to fetishize this one house, but the thinking that was within it."

Top photo by Yosigo, Rocafort, courtesy of Kettal, 2025.

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