Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray (1878-1976)
Architect and Furniture Designer



Eileen Gray is now considered as one of the most important architects and furniture designers of the 20th century. Her work inspired modernism and Art Deco movements. She remained independent throughout her career in a time when leading designers were predominantly male.

Her work is very distinctive with a luxuriant take on geometric forms and industrially produced materials.

She studied painting at the Slade School of Art in London before moving to Paris. Her passions quickly moved onto lacquering which can be painstaking and dangerous: she developed "lacquer disease" on her hands. She was taught for 4 years by Sugawara, a young Japanese lacquer craftsman. After opening a shop and having a successful period selling her work she moved into architecture.

In 1924 they began work on E-1027, situated on a steep cliff near Monaco. It was designed to be L-shaped, flat-rooved and have floor to ceiling windows facing the sea. Gray also designed the furniture for the interior of the building. 

After completion she built herself a small house "Tempe a Pailla" in the 1930s at Castellar. Living in such a compact home caused her to design many space saving devices such as the fold-able S-Chair.

Her work was largely unappreciated and she lived a quiet, reclusive life in her later years. Her work was brought back into the public eye with a review of her career in Domus magazine. Gray was quick to criticise when she thought her work was poorly displayed or restored, but later said: 

"One must be grateful to all those people who bother to unearth us and at least to preserve some of our work. Otherwise it might have been destroyed like the rest."

Gray's reputation was sufficient to warrant an announcement of her work on French national radio, albeit the first time she had ever been mentioned in a radio broadcast. 

I always find it interesting that so many 'famous' artists, designers and architects only became famous after or close to their deaths...