The Eames House in L.A. is open again after closing during the fires

After closing for five months due to smoke damage from the Palisades Fire, the Eames House (Case Study House #8) in Los Angeles has reopened to visitors—now with a more determined mission to serve as a place of community.

Nearly 7,000 buildings were destroyed in the Palisades Fire, and though the Eames House was spared, cleanup efforts have been intensive. A crew took about a week to wipe away flame retardant that had been dropped to slow the fire from advancing from the outside of the home. They also dug up the property’s plantings beds so the soil could be replaced due to concerns about toxic materials.

“We were very fortunate,” says Lucia Atwood, the granddaughter of architects Charles and Ray Eames who built the Pacific Palisades home in 1949. The home is a model of resilience, but its stewards were also proactive. Atwood tells Fast Company interventions began in 2011 to better fire- and drought-proof the home, which is a National Historic Landmark and on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Those efforts that took on greater urgency after the Getty Fire in 2019.

“At that point it became very clear that there were going to be an increasing number of of extremely damaging fires,” says Atwood, the former executive director of the Eames Foundation. The foundation has worked to harden the landscape, a process that included clearing brush and removing some of the more than 250 trees that were on the property.

Reopening events this month with local leaders, neighbors, and fire survivors have turned the Eames House into an Eames home for the community, as is the case for patrons of the Palisades Library, which was destroyed in the fires. After offering the library the use of the property, including the home’s studio, which is open to the public for the first time, for events like book clubs and sales, the head of the library got emotional, says Adrienne Luce, who was announced the Eames Foundation’s first non-family member executive director in April. 

“This place is for you,” Luce recalls telling the library’s head, and she says she started to choke up. “Being so close to the devastation actually is a wonderful opportunity to serve and support the local community and long-term community rebuilding efforts.” Reopening means “really engaging and serving the local community,” Luce says.