Charles F. Eaton and his family settled in Santa Barbara, California, in 1886, where Charles began his career as an art and crafts designer, working in metal, leather, and glass. He was born in Rhode Island in the 1840s to a wealthy family and as a young man, trained as a painter in Paris; later he moved to Nice, where he restored antique furniture and took up landscaping.
The gardens of Eaton’s Riso Rivo (“laughing riverlet”) estate in Montecito, California (now known as the El Mirador Estate) provided endless inspiration for his works; he even used his landscaping talents to create a lotus pond complete with a floating tea room that attracted the attention of architects and craftsmen throughout the United States. Of his gardening, Elizabeth Eaton Burton, his daughter, was later quoted as saying “(my) artist father was carving out his pictures in living green substance, or in age-old rock. He was observing nature’s harmonies in line and rhythm, and the contours of the land, so as to produce a perfect whole in miniature.” (Source: Montecito Journal)
Sometime before the end of the 19th century, Eaton built a studio on his estate and set to work creating coffers, screens, and lamps. In the spring of 1902, Eaton bought land in downtown Santa Barbara on Chapala Street, from which he created three studios. Each had a large front room which could be used as a reception area or an exhibition gallery. Before the studios officially opened in 1904, Eaton and his daughter garnered very favorable press in national magazines like The House Beautiful (summer, 1903 and February 1904) and a 1904 issue of Gustav Stickley’s influential The Craftsman.
A number of important artists of the day chose Eaton’s studio building either to exhibit or to set up shop for short or extended stays: Among them, book artist Robert Wilson Hyde, photographers Mr. and Mrs. W. Edwin Glenhill, Japanese artist Sekko Shimada, and San Francisco-based art and antiquities connoisseur G.T. Marsh.
Eaton submitted two small cabinets, leather work, book bindings, and metal to the 1904 Exposition in St. Louis; five years later, in 1909, he was honored with a third grand prize in the arts and crafts exhibit at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle.
(Sources: Montecito Journal, “The Way It Was” by Hattie Beresford, October 11, 2007 and Patricia Gardner Cleek, “Arts and Crafts in Santa Barbara: The Tale of Two Studios.” Noticias, Winter/1992)