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Eileen Gray's House E-1027 - a unique modern movement heritage
Conference Paper · November 2020
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Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
Conclusion: An Architect Who Entered Politics
Fátima Pombo
Nadia Godar-Devinoy got her diploma in 1977 at the École de Chaillot, where the feminisation
process started at the beginning of the 1970s in a context of rebuilding and new attractiveness
of the school. Taking the role of ABF architect in 1978 in the Moselle Department, Nadia GodarDevinoy is also one of the first women who had this position.
University of Aveiro, Department of Communication and Art | Portugal
Anna Marie Fisker
Aalborg University, Department of Civil Engineering | Denmark
Looking at Nadia Devinoy’s career, the field of ‘heritage’ appeared to be one, in the twentieth century,
where women could work as architects and build a career, taking administrative roles.
Carrying out her duties as an ABF paved the way for her to enter politics as it required her to
develop diplomatic skills in her relationships with mayors, architects, ministries etc. This position
also allowed her to become a public figure, someone famous. The fact that numerous press
articles were published about her also gave her the opportunity to express her points of view, her
commitment towards the city of Metz and her wishes to renovate this city.
Eileen Gray's House E-1027:
a Unique Design of Modern Movement Heritage
Actually, in 1995, she became a politician and the deputy mayor of Metz, in charge of urbanism
and housing policy. She carried out these functions between 1995 and 199922 and also became the
director of The Agence d’urbanisme de l’Agglomération Messine (the urban planning Agency of Metz
Region).
The ABF role is one of the high-level positions women accessed since the 1970s in France; it
remains to be seen if women were working in others less-valued positions related to heritage field,
at the beginning of the twentieth century or even less before.
Prologue
An auction house. The price knocked down to the buyer stopped at 19.5 million euro.
The object sold for such an exorbitant price at Christie’s in Paris in 2009 was a small brown leather
armchair once owned by Yves Saint Laurent, the selling price making it the most expensive piece
of twentieth century design ever auctioned. The unique piece, an armchair just 61 cm high, known
as the Dragons armchair because of the ornate sculptures on its sweeping armrests, was created
between 1917 and 1919 by the Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878–1976). Despite the global recession,
frenzied bidding between the world’s richest furniture collectors pushed the price to more than six
times the estimate. The event, which was recorded, functions as the start of the movie The Price of
Desire, a movie that delineates the controversial story of how Eileen Gray’s influential contribution to
twentieth century architecture and design was almost entirely wiped from history by the egotistical
‘Father of Modernism’ – Le Corbusier.
22 In 1999, she resigned: Jean-Marie Rausch and Nadia Devinoy were in conflict over one of Metz’s big project, SablonNord Project. She was against the project put forward by the Germans that had been selected by the mayor without
any consideration for her advice, so she chose to step down.
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At the Christie’s auction, which was held in the Grand Palais, the chair was bought by the Vallois
Paris art gallery owners Robert and Cheska Vallois, who in the early 1970s after their first purchase
of this very special piece of art, had sold the Dragons armchair to Yves Saint Laurent for a hefty,
but undisclosed sum. Following Saint Laurent’s death, the art collection he had amassed with his
partner Pierre Bergé was auctioned, amongst the items for sale was Gray’s Dragons chair, and
amongst the bidders was Cheska Vallois. It was a much-wanted item, but just how wanted came
as a surprise to everyone, when asked afterwards, Cheska Vallois answered quite simply about the
price, that it had been ‘The price of desire’.
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Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
Chapter B: Women’s Legacy and Heritage: Protection, Restoration and Enhancement
The Early Start
It is noticeable that the movie opens with the re-enactment of the Dragon armchair’s purchase, as
the successful bidder of this astonishing sale, tries to explain the extravagant price tag to a throng
of reporters.1 The movie then flashes back through the highlights of Gray’s life, told to the camera
by Le Corbusier. As the story gradually unfolds, Gray’s own, very different version emerges; how her
relationship with Jean Badovici, who was Le Corbusier’s promoter by way of his influential architectural
publication L’Architecture Vivante, further fueled the rift between the two architects, both personally
and professionally, consigning her legacy to a century of neglect and long-overdue recognition. The
sale of the Dragon armchair made a culmination, a point of no return to Eileen Gray’s legacy.
Eileen Gray’s career started out slow; however, she was a cult figure all her life among those who
knew her work. Her first client was the fashion designer Jacques Doucet, who dressed Sarah
Bernhardt and was himself beloved by Proust.
Doucet wanted to get rid of his collection of eighteenth century art and furniture and make his
apartment, and his life, more modern. Gray made him a large red lacquer screen called Le Destin
(1914), decorated on one side with the shadowy figures of three men, and on the other with
swooping silver and gold forms. The tones used, black ebony and silver on a red background are
made according to Chinese techniques. This work is in the boundary of a more figurative production
period (till 1914) and a period where appeared for the first time furniture and abstract themes that
cover the years from 1914 till 1920.2
Soon designers, aristocrats and members of the beau monde placed their own orders with the Irishborn Gray. Each piece was unique, made by Gray herself. It did not hurt that she drove a roadster
along the streets of Belle Epoque Paris, dressed in Poiret coats and hats by Lanvin, and with her
lover, the nightclub singer Marie-Louise Damien, better known as Damia, sitting next to her, while
Damia’s pet panther rode in the back.3
The legendary hat designer Suzanne Talbot was among the first patrons to provide Eileen Gray with
a genuine opportunity to design an entire interior, and it was she that acquired the Dragons armchair
directly from the artist.4
1 Mary MacGuckian (dir.), The Price of Desire (Ireland; Belgium: EG Film Productions et al., 2015), Film.
2 Brigitte Loye, Eileen Gray: 1879–1976: Architecture, Design (Paris: J. P. Viguier, 1984).
3 Deirdre McQuillan, “Eileen Gray, thoroughly modern maker,” The Irish Times, November 29, 2014, https://www.
irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/eileen-gray-thoroughly-modern-maker-1.2015801 (Accessed January 16,
2018); Jeanne Wilette, “Eileen Gray, Designer of Art Deco, Part One,” Art history Unstuffed (posted November 10,
2017), http://arthistoryunstuffed.com/eileen-gray-designer-of-art-deco-part-one/ (Accessed 16 January 2018).
4 Philippe Garner, “Dragons Armchair,” The Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Berge Collection: The Sale of the Century, edited
by Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 106.
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Fig. 1. Eileen Gray’s House E-1027 (photo Andrea Furlan, 2018). Courtesy by Association Cap Moderne.
Gray spent two years crafting the Dragons chair. A process where she hand-rubbed lacquer, layer
after layer, letting it set each time in the humidity of her bathroom, then spent days polishing the
chair. What emerged was as much a Symbolist sculpture as it was furniture.
Gray designed the exotic and symbolic creation for Talbot’s apartment on rue de Lota that she
completed in 1922. Such as it was deployed in this chair, the dragon –in Chinese culture, a figure
of kindness and strength, as well as of protection and vigilance– alludes to a depiction widespread
in Chinese art.
The enveloping, enfolding shape of the armchair, the curvilinear form of the seat, together with the
padded upholstered back and the originally light-coloured fabric, might be seen as a transposition
of this traditional motif and its evocation. The Dragons armchair stands as a masterpiece of the
first phase of Eileen Gray’s career, explains expert in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Philippe Garner. It
perfectly encapsulates the inventiveness, quality, and subtlety of her art.5
5 Garner, “Dragons Armchair,” 107.
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Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
Chapter B: Women’s Legacy and Heritage: Protection, Restoration and Enhancement
Eileen Gray and the Modern Movement
Gray’s lacquer pieces are still the most prized of her works, regarded as luxurious objects, and,
more to the point, there are very few of them. The pieces of furniture Gray made from around 1913
to 1922 is often categorised as Art Deco, but by the time of the 1925 Paris Exposition, which was
the first grand showcase for Art Deco pieces, Gray had moved on, embracing the machine-age
utopian vision of modernism.
For little more than a decade, from her first participation in the Paris Salon in 1913 until her shift in
focus toward modernist architecture in the 1920s, Eileen Gray revealed a unique sensibility as she
allied the painstaking craft in the demanding medium of lacquer with an ability to conjure novel and
mysterious forms and motifs. This paper will focus on the late 1920s period where Gray became
an architect, designing a house for another of her lovers, the Romanian architect Jean Badovici.
The house is Gray’s finest work: a whitewashed concrete home called the , built into a cliff overlooking
the Mediterranean, as a hideaway for herself and her lover (Fig. 1).
When Gray broke up with Jean Badovici and moved out of the house Badovici’s friend and later
neighbour Le Corbusier loved it so much, he ‘destroyed’ it –as far as Gray was concerned– by
painting lewd murals on the walls during a visit. To the actions of Le Corbusier damaging the walls
of E-1027 Gray called ‘an act of vandalism’. After years of neglect, the home has been restored and
is now reopened as a museum. Le Corbusier’s murals have been left intact. (Fig. 2)
During the construction of the house, Eileen remained in a little flat in Roquebrune for most of the
time till the house was built. ‘Eileen was in Roquebrune working on her new project, which took all
her energy and enthusiasm. Very little else mattered to her now’.6
The work was terribly hard. As there was no road, all the material had to be brought on
wheelbarrows to the site. Eileen remembered how lonely and tired she was at the end of each
day. The only diversion was the daily swim in the crystal-clear water right underneath the
house. There was no one to talk to, and she took most of her meals alone, sometimes sharing
a sandwich with the workers who lived on the site.7
Dr. Lynne Walker, a British specialist in gender history corroborates that Gray not only lived on the
site for E-1027 but that she acted as builder and designer of all aspects of the architecture, including
6 Lynne Walker, “The Entry of Women into the Architectural Profession in England,” The Education of the Architect,
edited by N. Bingham (London: Society of Architectural Historians, 1993), 181.
7 Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 191.
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Fig. 2. One of Le Corbusier’s
murals in the House E-1027
(photo Andrea Furlan, 2018).
Courtesy by Association Cap
Moderne.
the furnishings and fittings.8 A fact, Walker argues, is a similar practice to the Arts and Crafts ideal.9
Both –the movement and Gray– shared a commitment to craftsmanship and careful construction,
as well as the practice of working closely with artisans. It is, we find, significant that the Arts and
Crafts Movement aimed to break down the hierarchy of the arts that favoured painting, sculpture
and architecture over the applied arts and thus encouraged the collaboration of artists, designers
and architects, which Gray explored throughout her career.
Arts and Crafts approaches, continues Walker, encouraged the crossing of artistic and professional
boundaries with architects designing for the applied arts and sculptors and painters applying
their work to architecture. Gray’s move from painting to craft and from design to architecture was
undoubtedly facilitated by these exact ideas, which is something that needs to be considered in
this context.10
Moreover, Gray’s architectural activities both challenged and helped break down the repressive
mechanism of the sexual division of labour, that was limiting women’s design activities to areas
associated with the applied or so-called lesser arts. Around 1900, gender not only circumscribed the
choice of the professional activities available to women but also determined access architectural
education. Had Eileen Gray stayed to study architecture at the University of London after her training
at the Slade, she would have been offered only a short, non-professional course, which was all that
8 Lynne Walker, “Architecture and reputation: Eileen Gray, gender and Modernism,” Women’s Places: Architecture and
Design 1860–1960, edited by Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke ( London: Routledge, 2003).
9 Walker, “Architecture and reputation.”
10 Walker, “Architecture and reputation,” 98.
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Chapter B: Women’s Legacy and Heritage: Protection, Restoration and Enhancement
Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
was open to women at the Bartlett School of Architecture at that time.11 The other school which
would have undoubtedly been considered by her, The Architectural Association, had turned away
women applicants in 1893 and did not take women until 1917.12
Gray stated that ‘a home is not a machine to live in’ in response to Le Corbusier’s often quoted line
about a house being a machine à habiter. Eileen engaged herself in designing an alternative to the
modern (gender) architecture.
However, Gray’s professional and feminine enhancement of modern architecture and interiors are
very clearly acknowledged by Badovici who wrote:
She pondered for long hours about ‘sitting, relaxing, reading, eating, conversing, entertaining,
washing, dressing and sleeping – and devised novel solutions in furniture and fittings which exploited
compactness, versatility, respect for function, practicality, and what might in a later jargon be called
user-friendliness’.14 Disregarding the urban concerns that informed Le Corbusier’s early Purist villas,
Eileen Gray occupies the centre of modern movement… She knows that our time, with its new
possibilities of living, necessitates new ways of feeling. The formidable influence of technology
has transformed our sensibilities. All her work reflects a lyrical force, an enthusiasm, and the
strength of feeling of this new civilization and spirit… The beauty of her work …is derived from
an original and lyrical élan which gives her objects their profound unity…This systematic unity…
gives all her designs a unique, architectonic significance. Furniture, wall hangings, the general
mood seem to be like the components of a soul, the soul of its inhabitant, whose outside form
corresponds to its inner rhythm.13
Beyond the fact that Badovici supported the plan of building up the house E-1027 and collaborated
with technical knowledge, he, as an architecture critic and editor of the periodical Architecture Vivante,
was able to catch the vivid creativity of Gray as representative of the spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk.
Gray chose the site, defined the volume, and designed the furniture creating a meaningful modern
place to live.
Eileen Gray a Designer Working with Architecture
It is a fact that in E-1027 house, she used the most recent innovations of modern architecture,
incorporating elements from Loos’ anti-ornamentalism, the Bauhaus functionalism, and most
obviously, Le Corbusier’s not yet widely published five points for new architecture. However, she
interpreted through a personal way the rigid principles of L’Esprit Nouveau, and therefore brought
into the functionalism, that she accepted, the idea of modern dwelling with comfort and flexibility
to integrate the gestures that express daily life’ vicissitudes. With a peculiar sense of detail, she
considers the importance of a balanced body and mind and its functions while occupying a place
that should be a home.
11 Walker, “The Entry of Women,” 39–46.
12 Walker, “Architecture and reputation,” 98.
13 Philippe Garner, Eileen Gray: Design and Architecture (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993), 28.
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Gray generated her domestic architecture from within the private domain of the dwelling. Eileen
writes about her conception of inhabiting as a very organic context and ‘each of the inhabitants
could, if need be, find total independence and an atmosphere of solitude and concentration.’15
She conceived the house from the interior outward, from a reconsideration of the modern individual’s
need for an interior life and a place of retreat, a direction seemingly at odds with Modern-Movement
predilections for transparency and spatial continuity. ‘The interior plan should not be the incidental result
of the facade’, she argued in reaction to certain of Le Corbusier’s built works. ‘It should live a complete,
harmonious and logical life’. She sought a more integrated conception, an interior that ‘as in Gothic
times [was] a homogenous whole built for man to the human scale and balanced in all its parts’.16
It is important to notice that the independent Gray, felt that each room should remain independent
of the others. Therefore, a home should provide the possibility of being independent and free. The
inhabitants ‘must have the impression of being alone, and if desired, entirely alone’.17
The quote from Baudelaire on the living room wall ‘Invitation au Voyage’ invites the visitor into a
space that would have been by then familiar, where one would have expected an open floor-plan
furnished sparsely with aluminium and chrome in the camping style, a boudoir for the lady of the
house, a study for the man and an overall arrangement that encouraged maximum action and
productivity. One would not have expected a space as an invitation to luxuriate, not have expected
soft wool multi-layered rugs, an extendable divan piled with cushions and fur blankets, below a
nautical map stencilled with the quote from Baudelaire to form the centrepiece of the main room.
One would not have expected the elimination of gendered spaces, an architecture designed for the
prone, lounging body with divans in every room equipped with trays for holding drinks and cigarettes,
lights for reading and writing and electrical outlets for hot water. One would never have expected an
architecture of such intimacy and sensuality, an architecture incorporating so much of the decadence
14
15
16
17
Garner, Eileen Gray, 30.
Adam, Eileen Gray, 198.
Eileen Grayand Jean Badovici, “Description [of E.1027],” L’Architecture Vivante 3 (1929), 25, 28.
Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000), 95.
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Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
Chapter B: Women’s Legacy and Heritage: Protection, Restoration and Enhancement
that it would have looked –from the outside– to have rejected the whole modernist manifest.
Concerning the gender question, some researchers suggest that Gray mixed elements of the
sensual, feminised boudoir with the austere, masculinised studio to produce gender-free living and
working spaces. In this design process she was deliberating creating flexible designs and systems
of tables, beds and lighting that could be combined in different ways and had multiple purposes
in spaces geared towards study and work not associated with either sex; thereby destabilising the
traditional separations of home/work, of female/male.18
A Design Integrating Furniture and Architecture
Gray’s integration of furniture and architecture facilitated multiple uses in each space. She
conceived the living room opening onto a narrow balcony as a loggia, equipped with screen-like
vertical windows capable of opening fully to admit sunlight and view. A partition, incorporating
shelves, coatrack, and umbrella stand, blocks the space from view upon entry; a sleeping alcove
and adjoining shower/dressing area in the far corner of the room, and a dining alcove near the stair
contribute to the room’s plurality of use, evoking the spirit of her Boudoir de Monte Carlo.19
The film, The Price of Desire, by the Irish film director Mary McGuckian, provides an architectural
poetic scene showing Gray imagining the rooms, the view and even the living in the E-1027 when
in a scene opening doors to the imaginary view and gaining control over the emptiness of a nonexisting building. At the end of the scene, she dances with Badovici, emphasising the at that time
romantic relation they had.20
The strategy in Gray’s Mediterranean work of orienting bedrooms to the east, living rooms to the south
and west, and service areas to the north reflects a negotiation of both the Zeilenbau21 approach of
designing for morning sunlight in bedrooms and afternoon sunlight in living areas, and Adolf Behne’s
counter-idea that service areas should be located to the north and living areas to the south.22
18 Constant, Eileen Gray, 52; Bridget Elliott, “Housing the work: Women artists, modernism and the maison d’artiste: Eileen
Gray, Romaine Brooks and Gluck,” Women Artists and the Decorative Arts (1880–1935): The Gender of Ornament, edited
by Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), 181–182; Susan Hoyal, “Gray,
Eileen,” Encyclopedia of Interior Design, Vol. 1–2, edited by Joanna Banham (London: Routledge, 1997).
19 MacGuckian, The Price of Desire, 00:26:40–00:29:01.
20 Here ‘Zeilenbau’ is used as a pejorative term to describe any organisation of minimalist housing slabs arranged in
parallel, open-ended rows; also applied to a single minimalist east/west slab with blank ends and minimal detail.
21 Paul Overy, Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture between the Wars (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 121.
22 Adam, Eileen Gray.
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Fig. 3. Eileen Gray’s House E-1027 interior (photo Andrea Furlan, 2018). Courtesy by Association Cap Moderne.
In the film Eileen Gray: Her Life and her Work, the filmmaker and author Peter Adam’s claims that
Eileen Gray calculated ‘the precise passage of the sun’. Gray did pick up a more or less southern
orientation; she shifted the building away from its terraced site.23
Jean-Paul Rayon suggested that ‘she opted for a superior cosmological order; the trajectory of
the sun. The north-south axis appears as the diagonal of a pair of rectangular co-ordinates in the
horizontal plane’.24
Gray’s Interiors
Architectural writer and critic Caroline Constant accentuates that combining sensuousness with
practicality Gray attached back-rests of ribbed satin padding to the adjoining walls, and a folding
23 J. P. Rayon, “Eileen Gray: The North Star and the South Star,” 9H, 8 (1989), 170.
24 Constant, Eileen Gray, 105.
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Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement: Toward a New Perception and Reception
Chapter C: Women in Communication and Professional Networks
type of axonometric projection, known as the ‘American method’, as part of their renewed emphasis
on domestic interiors.28 It is a drawing technique that articulates the principle of a total concept
of design wherein wall and window, furnishings, and floor and carpeting contribute equally to the
creation of a complete and private milieu. Because this type of drawing tends to isolate a single
volume from the spatial sequence, Gray used it to emphasise the functional multiplicity associated
with the modern spatial concept; each room takes on attributes of a broader living environment.
Epilogue
Gray’s design of E-1027, relying upon the refuse of modernity as a male-hero-focused narrative,
called the attention of modernists and became an icon of modernist architecture’s personal
interpretation. The architecture of E-1027 transcends the neutrality of geometrically determined and
physically defined structure and enclosure to become a site of lived life, where cultural processes,
gender transactions, and modus of sexual desire are continually enacted. The villa was designed to
shelter the individual, alone or socialising, the landscape, and the multi-functionality of a home as
an invitation to experience the space of living in an organic and slowly mood.
Fig. 4 and 5. Eileen Gray’s House E-1027 interiors (photo Andrea Furlan, 2018). Courtesy by Association Cap Moderne.
end table, light fixture, and electric switches to her collage. Gray extended multiple purposes to
the private enclave of studio/bedroom, where she differentiated areas for working, sleeping, and
dressing, and modified floor-tile colours and ceiling heights to enhance such distinctions of use.25
Today the house and the ideals persecuted by Gray are restored symbolically with the recent
reopening of E-1027 surviving, then, all the mishaps and oblivion. Gray’s professional and feminine
enhancement of modern architecture and interiors are a paramount legacy that deserves more
discussion and acknowledgement.
In contrast to the bright and open workspace overlooking the sea, where she suspended a reflective
ceiling fixture capable of drawing additional daylight into the interior, she created a more protective
domain for sleeping by articulating the furnishings as extensions of the walls: a headboard that
incorporates storage compartments, reading lights, a clock electrical switches, and an extending
table top; closet and clothes cupboards that line the side walls; a shallow aluminium storage cabinet
that projects from the wall to form a dressing alcove.
To convey her intentions, underlines Constant, Gray adopted a drawing technique prevalent in
eighteenth-century English representations of domestic interiors. She represented each room as
four sectional elevations ‘folded out’ from the plan. Architects associated with de Stijl revived this
25 Ibid.
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