Growing up with Charles and Ray Eames
On this day, the 101st birthday of Charles Eames, the U.S. Postal Service is releasing a new collection of stamps depicting furniture, art and architecture from the famous couple.
(Stop by Design Within Reach through Saturday for a sale on all Eames furniture and other lines produced by Herman Miller.)
But the coolest thing about these stamps is that Derry Noyes, the Washington, DC, designer who conceived of and created the stamps, grew up with the Eames. They were close friends of her parents, and some of the furniture Noyes portrays on the stamps furnished her childhood home.
Noyes’ father, Eliot Noyes, was an architect who became the first director of the Museum of Modern Art’s (then) new industrial design department in the 1940s. One of his first acts was to hold a competition for furniture design. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won that competition with the innovative molded plywood chair, which has since come to be known as the potato-chip chair. You can see them featured in a modern Old Town Alexandria space in our current issue, along with the Eames Lounge Chair.
After that MoMA competition, Eliot Noyes would call on Eames many more times to be a consultant for design and film projects when Noyes moved on to be an industrial designer for IBM.
“They became lifelong friends,” Derry recalls. Where Charles had the architectural background and Ray Eames was an artist, “my parents were very similar,” she says, in that her father was an architect and her mother, Molly Noyes, was an interior designer. “It went much further than a business relationship. Design was a way of life. It wasn’t compartmentalized. It was a point of view.”
One of Derry’s first Eames memories is when she was 4 in 1956, and her parents had four of the original Lounge Chairs in their home. “I would put my cats in there and swivel them around to make them dizzy,” she says, laughing. Two of those chairs remain in her Cleveland Park home.
Derry’s childhood bedroom had the Eames wire chair in it (which is also depicted in the stamps). It had a thin blue pad on it, and it also remains in her home today. An original Hang-it-All, the rack with colorful round balls on it, graces her home on Martha’s Vineyard.
Just as she retains several original Eames pieces, she also retains the aesthetic that they and her parents instilled.
“Design was a way of thinking. You surround yourself with things that give you joy – not that the pattern on your curtain will match the pattern you upholster your sofa in. [Design] happens over time. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Stamp collectors can live that life vicariously through Derry’s designs. In addition to the Eames stamps, she’s also designed stamps for her parents’ other friends:
Alexander Calder (Yes, she has an original Calder mobile at her home.)
And Isamu Noguchi (His works can be found in her childhood home in New Canaan, CT, which her father designed and where her mother still lives.)
