Eileen Gray’s the Indie Design Icon You Need to Know
Portrait Of Eileen Gray, 1926. Photo: Getty Images
Who: Eileen Gray
What: An Irish architect and designer (1879-1976) whose outstanding works rival her sensational relationships.
Fans: Elsa Schiaparelli, the Maharajah of Indore, Le Corbusier, Yves Saint Laurent
Tell Me More: In 2009, a piece of 20th-century furniture by an architect/designer set a record high (selling for $28 million) at a Christie’s auction. It was Eileen Gray’s leather Dragons armchair—from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, designed somewhere around 1917 (give or take a few years). Even people not connected to the art and design world wanted to know: Who was the woman behind this record-setter? What was she all about?
Eileen Gray armchair from Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Berge Collection in Brussels. Photo: Corbis
Gray started making decorative panels and lacquer screens before moving onto furniture: desks and beds as one-of-a-kind pieces for her wealthy clients and eventually branching out to carpets, as well. She ran a shop by the name of Jean Désert on the fashionable rue du Faubourg St. Honoré from 1922-1930, attracting Paris’ beau monde, including clients like Elsa Schiaparelli and the Maharaja of Indore.
If her name rings a bell, it’s likely for her metal furniture, which she first started designing around 1925, though it wasn’t until the 1970s, when she was in her nineties, that her furniture, like this e1027 adjustable side table (a part of the permanent collection of MoMA), was suitable for mass production. The table is named for arguably her most famous building, perched on a wooded cliff in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. Known as e1027, the home she designed for her lover, architecture critic Jean Badovici, “emerged as a model of a new approach to Modernism,” according to an article in the New York Times outlining its tumultuous restoration, unveiled to the public this spring. (J is the 10th letter of the alphabet, B the second and G the seventh.)
Eileen Gray’s e-1027. Photo: Courtesy of Friends E. 1027
The tumult isn’t hard to imagine when considering that not long after the home’s completion in 1929, they broke up and Gray moved out. Then, almost a decade later, Badovici’s friend Le Corbusier visited and painted eight enormous murals on the wall—without consulting Gray, who pronounced this “an act of vandalism.” Eileen Gray may have died in 1976, but her legacy continues to influence scores of designers today. For a glimpse of this, check out the documentary, Gray Matters, released last year.
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