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Herman Miller’s Eames Shell Chair: 75 and upwards

75 years on, Herman Miller's Eames Shell Chair remains the most influential seat.

12 Aug 2025

Chairs, through the years, have undergone minor tweaks to established forms and incremental improvements in comfort and durability. Then came the 1950s, when Charles and Ray Eames decided that seating deserved the same radical rethinking that had transformed architecture and industrial design. Iterations and setbacks emboldened them to create the iconic Herman Miller shell chair. Its innate ability to adapt to almost any space makes it universally beloved.

Years of experimenting with moulded plywood, striving to achieve a single shell form, eventually led them to change course. Stamped metal brought their vision to life and won them an entry in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1948 International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design.

INCEPTION

Realising how difficult and costly their original design would be to produce, the pair pivoted to fibreglass, ultimately creating the world’s first off-the-rack plastic chair. This marked the beginning of many material explorations the Eames Office would undertake with Herman Miller. The one-piece shell concept has never been tied to any single material. The original 1950 designs were fibreglass, with bent wire following the next year.
When the environmental hazards of working with fibreglass became apparent, they switched to polypropylene. Later, advances in material technology made it possible to return to a safer fibreglass option, along with introducing wood and recycled plastic shells. The most recent innovation came in 2022 with moulded plastic shells containing 100 per cent post-industrial recycled plastic. All are now part of the brand’s range, alongside options for upholstery and seat pads.

UNIVERSALITY

A choice of bases addresses diverse seating needs — dining, lounging, working, even rocking a baby to sleep. Multiple base types and finishes, arms or armless, upholstered or not, and a joyful palette with colours ranging from beige to lemon yellow, seafoam green and red — such variations create more than a million possible combinations. This infinite versatility made the Eames Shell Chair irresistible to museums, schools, businesses and individuals.

By the 1960s, as its popularity grew, the chair was found in dining and lounge areas of California’s legendary roadside attraction, The Nut Tree — one of the earliest authorised Herman Miller retailers. It also appeared as tandem sling seating at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. With the addition of a stacking and interlocking base, it became a school staple in auditoriums, gymnasiums and classrooms.

75 YEARS OF DESIGN EXCELLENCE

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Herman Miller commissioned Los Angeles-based Benjamin Critton, Tokyo’s Luis Mendo and Sydney-based Tete Garcia to create unique interpretations of the Eames Shell Chair, further demonstrating its adaptability and relatability.

Variations of the display will be exhibited in selected retail stores and dealer and wholesale showrooms in the Americas, Australia and Asia. Commissioned artworks, “shell spotting” highlights from real homes, archival artefacts and stories are being shared widely through social media.
Perhaps the shell chair’s most subversive accomplishment is not that it became ubiquitous, but that it democratised good design without diluting it. In boardrooms and cafeterias, penthouses and public spaces, it refuses to signal class or status. It simply does its job with a quiet confidence that has outlasted countless trends, fads and supposed innovations.

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