Visual Feast is a curated exploration of creativity combining visual inspiration with practical insights.

Amuse Bouche

“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.” — Charles Eames

Small Plates

Main Course

Charles and Ray Eames were known to choose and position objects in their home carefully: industrial steel met Mexican folk art, prototype chairs neighbored Victorian toys. Every arrangement created new dialogues between unlikely halves.

The Eames saw connections everywhere. From seashells to city grids, atoms to galaxies. And their Pacific Palisades house wasn't just a home. It was a laboratory of Select and Arrange – their core design philosophy, and their superpower.

Take the Eames Lounge Chair: they studied a worn baseball glove – its leather darkened and softened by decades of summer games, molded perfectly to the curve of a hand. They observed how Japanese joinery could lock forms together without visible hardware. They analyzed the way aircraft plywood could flex without breaking. From these disparate elements emerged a chair that aged like leather, joined like temple wood, and curved like wings. The confluence of sport, craft, and industry created something new: furniture that seemed to embrace the body like a well-loved mitt, growing more beautiful each year.

"The extent to which you have a design style," Charles said, "is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem." This wasn't about aesthetics. Each unlikely connection was a solution waiting to be discovered. Each unexpected pairing held the potential for innovation.

What unexpected teachers are hiding in your plain sight?

Leave a comment

Dessert

Pairings

Let Loose by Kind Regards, written by my friend Shopé Delano is a remarkable meditation on pursuing creative work from a place of ease: “letting loose is about carving out more space to be…for life, it means knowing you are rarely running out of time.” Subscribe here.

Share Studiolo