Eileen Gray Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was an Irish designer and architect who worked mainly in France. Trained in fine art and in Japanese lacquer, she designed furniture and interiors of great refinement, including the Bibendum chair and the adjustable E-1027 table, and then turned to architecture with E-1027, the villa she built with Jean Badovici at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Long overshadowed, she is now recognised as a pioneer of modern architecture and design.

Enniscorthy, London and Paris

Gray was born in 1878 near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. She studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she discovered lacquer work, and settled in Paris in the early 1900s, learning traditional lacquer techniques from the Japanese craftsman Seizo Sugawara.

Lacquer, furniture and Jean Désert

Gray’s lacquer screens, tables and interiors, such as the apartment she decorated for the milliner Madame Mathieu-Lévy, won wide admiration. In 1922 she opened her own gallery, Jean Désert, on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, selling her furniture, rugs and lamps, and she moved toward tubular steel and simpler forms.

E-1027

Encouraged by the architect and critic Jean Badovici, Gray designed E-1027 (1926-1929), a white villa on the rocks above the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, with its own furniture, built-in fittings and sliding screens. Le Corbusier, who later painted murals on its walls without her consent and built his cabanon nearby, admired the house. Restored after years of neglect, it is now open to visitors.

Tempe à Pailla and recognition

Gray then built her own house, Tempe à Pailla, in Castellar (1935), and later Lou Pérou near Saint-Tropez. She continued designing into old age and died in Paris in 1976. In 2009 her Dragon armchair sold at auction for more than 21 million euros, a record for twentieth-century design.