Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray, the first woman to achieve recognition as an architect, was born surrounded by Victorian splendor in County Wexford, Ireland, but made her fame as a modern designer and architect in Paris. Skilled in building mystery and enigma into her work, she was no self publicist even though she was one of the first women to fly in an aeroplane.

She was an early materials innovator and her experimentation with steel pipe pre-dated the work of Mies van der Rohe, Breuer and Le Corbusier. Encouraged by an acquaintance with Le Corbusier and by her lover Jean Badovici, Gray built – practically by herself over three years – her villa at Cap Martin in the South of France, E-1027.

She broke from Le Corbusier’s new age animated by technology, mass production and geometric order: refuting one of his most famous aphorisms, she said, "a house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation..." All of her best-known furniture pieces were designed for the villa – the famous side table, the Bibendum chair, the Nonconformist armchair and the Transat deckchair. Le Corbusier was captivated – perhaps obsessed – by the little villa and wrote to her, following a summer at her house: “a rare spirit … has given the modern furniture and installations such a dignified, charming, and witty shape."

Variability, folding and sliding systems intrigued her. Gray punctured much of modernism’s inflated seriousness when its dominant tone was one of muscular religiosity. This can be seen in the side table that can be slid under a bed, raised by lockable telescope legs or carried about by virtue of its light weight. Gray’s sister was fond of breakfast in bed, hence it was designed with this principal function in mind.