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Charles Eames, born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, studied architecture at the University of Washington and opened his own architectural firm in 1930 with Charles M. Gray. In 1935, he created a new architectural firm with Robert T. Walsh and in 1938 he received a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan where he taught design a year later. In 1940, he won, with Eero Saarinen, first prize in the organic design competition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and became head of the industrial design department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1941 he married Ray Kaiser.

Ray Eames, née Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, in 1912 in Sacramento, California, studied painting at the May Friend Bennet School in Millbrook, New York. Until 1937, she studied the paintings of the Hofmann School and in 1937 she participated in the first exhibition of American abstract artists at the Riverside Museum in New York. In 1940, she enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and married Charles Eames in 1941.