A tour of Eileen Gray's hideaway

The Enniscorthy-born furniture designer turned architect was a shy and reclusive figure, but she's back in the public consciousness as E-1027, the revolutionary villa she designed and built in southeast France, undergoes a belated restoration, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris

THIS YEAR might be called The Year of Eileen Gray. In February, the Dragon armchair made by the Anglo-Irish decorator, designer and architect in 1917 became the most costly chair in history, when it sold for €21.9 million at auction. The collector who bought it remains anonymous, but Cheska Vallois, the gallery owner who represented the buyer, said the astronomical sum was “the price of desire”. No wonder the National Museum of Ireland, whose Collins Barracks branch maintains a permanent Gray exhibition, despairs of acquiring more pieces.

Also this year, the French government, local authorities and the cement company Lafarge have joined forces to restore E-1027, the revolutionary but ill-fated villa (of which more later) that Gray designed and built at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. “This restoration is tardy, official recognition of Eileen Gray, who was neglected and forgotten,” said Pierre-Antoine Gatier, the chief architect on the restoration project.

Eileen Gray was more prone to self-doubt than to glorying in such success. She was a notoriously shy person, who lived as a semi-recluse at 21 Rue Bonaparte in Paris’s 6th district for decades before her death in 1976, aged 98. Gray refused to attend the openings of exhibitions in her honour in Paris, London, Los Angeles, Brussels, Vienna and New York in the 1970s, and sent a friend to receive the honorary title she was awarded by the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland when she was 94. Only three people attended her funeral in Père-Lachaise cemetery, where she was buried in a simple grave numbered 17616.

JEAN-PIERRE CAMARD is the leading French expert on art nouveau and art deco, and the expert and auctioneer, who has sold the largest number of pieces by Gray. In 1972, he was asked to assess the collection of the late high-fashion designer Jacques Doucet, which had been in storage for decades. He immediately recognised a lacquered screen entitled Le Destin, on which Gray painted two Greco-Roman-style figures pursuing a ghost. “It knocked me out,” Camard recalls. He valued the screen at 20,000 French francs. It sold for 170,000 francs – a phenomenal sum in 1972. “It was a revelation for a lot of people who didn’t know Gray’s work,” he says.

The Doucet sale put art deco – and Eileen Gray – on the map. While he was organising the sale, a colleague suggested that Camard talk to Gray; he hadn’t realised she was still alive. When he telephoned her, Gray initially refused, then relented when he proposed breakfast at a cafe in the Rue de Buci.

Camard had been warned that Gray was cantankerous. She wore mittens to their meeting, because her hands were damaged by years of working with toxic lacquer resin, and she complained that she was losing her eye-sight.

When Camard showed Gray a photograph of the Lotus table she had made for Doucet, which was about to be auctioned, the old woman reacted badly. “I don’t recognise it,” Gray said. “It is shameful to have done that.” Camard thought Gray was accusing him of attempting to fob off a fake as one of her pieces. “What do you mean, you don’t recognise it?” he asked. It turned out she objected to the silk cords and amber baubles that Doucet had added to her table. “I want you to destroy it,” she told Camard. The table sold for 61,000 francs. When Camard told Gray on the telephone, she replied: “It doesn’t mean it’s good. It means it’s expensive. That’s all.”

In 2005, Camard auctioned six chairs that Gray made for one of her lovers, the French singer Damia, before the first World War. Gray called Damia her Sirène or mermaid because of the singer’s voice. The chairs show a mermaid embracing a sea horse, and sold for an aggregate of €8.9 million, then a record.

When she met Damia, Gray cut her long auburn hair and began wearing elegantly tailored suits, as befitted a woman associated with the coterie of artistic Paris lesbians then known as the Amazons. Damia kept a pet panther, which the women walked on a leash in Paris. Gray overcame her shyness to accompany Damia to fashionable night clubs and restaurants.

Like the Mermaid chairs, the E-1027 villa was a labour of love by Gray, this time for a man. Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect 15 years her junior, encouraged Gray to shift from furniture design to architecture. In the summer of 1924, she scoured the Côte d’Azur for an appropriate site, using a donkey to carry her luggage. Gray purchased a terrace on the cliffside above the Mediterranean, so inaccessible that building materials had to be carted in by wheelbarrow.

Gray spent three years building E-1027. She was extremely discreet about her private life, and it was typical that she chose a coded name for the villa, which she gave to Badovici. E was for Eileen, 10 for the J in Jean, 2 for the B in Badovici and 7 for the G in Gray.

The couple spent several summers together at E-1027, but Jean’s drinking and womanising strained the relationship, and they parted amicably. The Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier stayed with them in the summer of 1937, praising Gray’s “rare spirit which dictates all the organisation inside and out”. Le Corbusier’s return the following year was less happy. Without asking Gray’s permission, the most famous architect of the 20th century stripped naked to paint eight garish murals with black paint on the villa’s blank walls. As Gray’s biographer Paul Adam wrote, she considered it an act of vandalism: “It was a rape. A fellow architect, a man she admired, had without her consent defaced her design.” In 1965, Le Corbusier died of a massive heart attack after swimming in the sea below the villa.

ITALIAN AND GERMAN soldiers occupied E-1027 during the second World War. One of Le Corbusier’s frescoes appears to have been used for target practice, or as the backdrop to an execution. Ironically, the existence of the frescoes that Gray hated probably prevented the villa being razed. After Badovici’s death in 1956, a friend of Le Corbusier’s bought it. She willed it to her doctor, who allegedly used it for orgies with local boys. In 1996, the doctor was knifed to death by two vagrants whom he lodged in exchange for work in the garden.

Built on stilts above the sea, the white, ship-like structure of E-1027 is an icon of modern architecture. (The National Museum at Collins Barracks has Gray’s original scale model on exhibit.) Though classified as a historic monument since 1975, it remained derelict for decades. Now curators are attempting to retrieve some of its original furnishings, and the garden is being replanted as it was in 1929. A series of events will mark its reopening next year.

The legacy of Eileen Gray, born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, in 1878, now appears secure. Despite her aristocratic origins (her mother was a baroness), privileged upbringing in Enniscorthy and Kensington, and her lack of material worries, Gray’s life was not easy. None of her love affairs survived long. Badovici and Le Corbusier were mistakenly credited for her pioneering work at E-1027. The new house she built for herself after separating from Badovici, her apartment in St Tropez and decades of work were destroyed in the war.

“One must never look for happiness,” Gray once said. “It passes you on your way, but always in the opposite direction. Sometimes I recognised it.”