Eileen Gray: an Irish woman who topped the world of design
Eileen Gray was one of the leading members of the modern design movement in the 20th century. She is renowned in France as a designer of lacquer furniture and interiors.
In the National Museum of Decorative Arts and History of Ireland, located at Collins Barracks in Stoneybatter, there is a permanent exhibition showcasing the history of Eileen Gray and her interior designs. This month the museum has been hosting a series of special events to celebrate her innovative architecture.
“She was a huge inspiration for me,” says Richard Malone, an Irish designer.
“When I was first learning about architecture and not being able to understand it, her designs helped me improved and come to an understanding – as she didn’t know either, going out on a whim for her plans,” he says.
Eileen Gray was born in 1878 and grew up in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, with her mother, a wealthy Scottish woman whose family bought Brownswood in the early 19th century and her father, a talented landscape and portrait painter.
In 1901, Gray enrolled in the Slade School, a progressive art college in London. During her time there, she found inspiration in the South Kensington Museum’s lacquer collections and Soho’s antique shops.
She eventually moved from the Slade School to the art school of the Latin Quarter, first encountering the radical artistic life of Paris.
Her visit to the Exposition Universelle in 1900 gave her experience and knowledge in the lacquer world, and purchasing her car in 1907 and flying an aeroplane in 1913 expressed her interest in modern technology.
Her first experience working with lacquer came when she helped repair screens in an antique shop in Soho in 1901. While in Paris in 1902, she worked with Seizo Sugawara, a master of lacquer who came from Japan to repair lacquer pieces on display.
With further training in lacquer work and cabinet making, she established herself as one of the leading designers of lacquered screens and decorative panels.
In 1922, she opened her own gallery, Jean Désert, in Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré in Paris, as an outlet for her designs. During the 1920s and 1930s, she became one of the leading leaders in the new theories of design and construction.
She worked closely with Le Corbusier and Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud and her most important collaborator, Jean Badovici, who suggested that Gray try her hand at architecture.
Gray and Badovici, between 1926 and 1929, worked together to create one of her most enduring achievements on a summer vacation residence called E.1027. It was a code for their intertwined initials: E for Eileen, 10 for J, and the 10th letter of the alphabet, and it had the same logic as B and G.
E.1027 was built on a stretch of the French Riviera on the western side of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin overlooking the Bay of Monaco. It was designed as a maison minimum – simple and efficient.
Le Corbusier described the place as “the house is a machine to live in.” While Gray describes it as more of a living organism, an extension of the human experience, stating that “it is not a matter of simply constructing beautiful ensembles of lines, but above all, dwelling for people.”
Eileen Gray died of lung cancer in 1976 and is buried in the Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
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