The Eames Lounge Chair was always expensive

October 12, 2025

A misconception I've seen with some frequency is that the Eames Lounge Chair started out as an affordable piece of furniture that only over time became a luxury good. While Ray and Charles Eames typically designed mass-produced, affordable furniture, the Eames Lounge Chair was explicitly a high-end product from its introduction in 1956.

If you actually look at old Herman Miller price lists, you'll find that the Eames Lounge Chair's price has remained surprisingly consistent since 1957 when adjusted for CPI inflation or median household income. Adjusting the 1957 list price of $578 for general inflation gets us to $6,630 in 2025 dollars, only ~6% higher than today's list price (and that's before factoring in the common 20% discount).

But why does it feel so expensive now?

Furniture as a category actually experienced deflation from the late 1990s until the late 2010s – you got ~20% more furniture per dollar in 2019 than you did in 1999. The mechanism was offshoring, which substantially reduced costs – and which also hollowed out America furniture manufacturing.

So by merely tracking general inflation, the price of the Eames Lounge Chair has grown much more quickly than the typical piece of furniture over the past 70 years. If you adjust its 1957 price using furniture-specific CPI instead of general CPI, you end up around $1800 2025 dollars. When you assume the Eames Lounge Chair is a generic piece of furniture, it currently costs 4x more than you'd expect based on its 1957 price.

But the Eames Lounge Chair is not a generic piece of furniture. It's an icon, and it's a luxury good. And critically, it's still manufactured in the United States. That dramatic reduction in costs from offshoring never applied to the Eames Lounge Chair.

Let's imagine a parallel universe where the Eames Lounge Chair's manufacturing was moved somewhere cheaper. What would that look like? Thanks to the world of Eames knockoffs, we don't have to wonder: a high-end dupe costs $1200-$2000, right in line with the $1800 that furniture-specific CPI indicates.