a house is not a machine to live in. it is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. —eileen gray
early life
Eileen Gray was born in Ireland to Scottish parents. Her mother was a direct descendant of the King of Scotland James V. Gray’s father was a landscape painter, which sparked in her a lifelong interest in the arts. Eileen spent her childhood partly in Ireland and partly in her family home in Kensington, London.
The Gray family, from Brownswood House in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford.
19-year-old Eileen Gray, 1897.
Eileen picnicking in Ireland with her sister Thora.
©National Museum of Ireland.
to create, one must first question everything. —eileen gray
Eileen Gray’s round Occasional table. © Aram. Aram.co.uk
lacquerie
and art deco
In 1900 Eileen Gray began to take classes at the prestigious Slade art school in London, including both sculpture and lacquering. In 1902 she relocated to Paris to continue her art education, then returned to London three years later to stay with her mother, who’d fallen ill, but later left for Paris again. It was then she started studying under Seizo Sugawara, a Japanese master of traditional lacquerie art. In 1910 Gray and Sugawara opened an interior design workshop in Paris.
In the following years the workshop became famous, despite the fact Grey and Sugawara were forced to flee to England to escape World War I. The peak achievement of this period was Gray’s interior design for the Rue de Lota apartment in Paris. In 1921 Gray became involved with architecture critic Jean Badovici and a year later opened her own boutique under the pseudonym Jean Désert.
Pirogue chaise lounge designed by Eileen Gray for Madame Mathieu-Lévy’s Rue de Lota Apartment in Paris, 1922.
Glass Salon at Madame Mathieu-Lévy’s Rue de Lota Apartment designed by Paul Ruaud and Eileen Gray. Paris, 1922.
Interior of Rue de Lota apartment designed by Eileen Gray for Madame Mathieu-Lévy. Paris, 1922.
if one can say le corbusier is one of the fathers of modernity, then one can say eileen gray is one of the mothers of modernity. —cloé pitiot, curator
Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair in interior. © Aram. Aram.co.uk
architecture and e-1027
Influenced by Badovici, Gray began to study avant-garde art and architecture with the support of Polish architect Adrienne Górska. Her style of furniture design evolved towards clean lines, metal, and glass. In 1926 Gray began work on a villa on the Mediterranean called E-1027.
The name is an acronym for the initials of Eileen and Jean Badovici: E for Eileen, 10 and 2 representing initials J and B, and 7 for G—her surname, Gray. It’s said that the name of the villa represents the embrace Gray gives to Badovici, and thus she turned away from the cold, machine-like attitude more typical of the avant-garde. It is also rumored that E-1027 is a subtle architectural pun against Le Corbusier.
