Charles & Ray Eames Child's Nested Chair, ca. 1945
GUEST: My husband and I inherited this from his grandmother. She bought it for her first daughter in the early '50s. And it was played with and used. I was told it was an Eames chair.
APPRAISER: It is a chair that was designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1945.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: For the Evans Products Company out of Venice, California. The Eames's got started in plywood manufacturing initially because they were contracted by the U.S. government to work with the Evans Plywood Company to create leg splints for the wartime effort.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: And they created that leg splint around 1942. They had had some previous experience doing molded plywood designs, but this little chair ends up being the first one that they create with Evans between 1945 and 1947.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Now, production got taken over by Herman Miller in the early '50s. But we believe that there were no more than 5,000 of these little chairs ever produced. And they were available in a series of colors: red, black, yellow, blue and magenta. Yours is sort of unfinished, raw birch plywood.
GUEST: There are one or two people that remember it being red and that it had been stripped.
APPRAISER: When you first brought it to the table, that was also my first thought, that it might originally have been a red aniline dye. That condition issue doesn't affect it tremendously.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: It's made of two pieces of molded five-ply plywood that is joined on the underside-- the back joins the seat with these three rivets in a triangular position. And that's how we know it's one of the early examples of this chair.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: The Eameses were really interested in traditional folk art and symbolism. And so they an-- they-they put that heart there, kind of as a nod to the sweetness of childhood. But it also has a practical role. It's meant so that little fingers can lift the chair...
GUEST: Oh...
APPRAISER: ...and move it around. Collectors of Eames know this chair as the Child's Nested Chair, also known as the Heart Chair. And the idea was that children could stack these, and as a result of them being child's pieces...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...not a lot of them survive. In the past 20 years, I think we've seen maybe 30 come up to auction.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: So they really are an absolute prize for Eames collectors. So in today's market, at auction, we would estimate this chair between $3,000 and $5,000.
GUEST: Wow, okay. (laughs) That's great news, thank you.
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Understanding Our Appraisals
Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.
Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
Note the date: Take note of the date the appraisal was recorded. This information appears in the upper left corner of the page, with the label "Appraised On." Values change over time according to market forces, so the current value of the item could be higher, lower, or the same as when our expert first appraised it.
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