PRODUCTS ROOMS Manufacturers & Designers Highlights Offers Info Stores
Adjustable Table E 1027
Tube Light
Adjustable Table E 1027 Replacement Glass
Adjustable Table E 1027 Black Version
Occasional Table
Petite Coiffeuse
Bibendum armchair
Roquebrune Chair

Eileen Gray

Born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, Eileen Gray spent her childhood in London and was among the first women to be admitted to the Slade School of Art where she took up painting in 1898 before undergoing an apprenticeship in a lacquer workshop. She moved to Paris in 1902 where she quickly established herself as one of the leading designers of lacquered screens and decorative panels.
During the '20s and '30s she became one of the leading exponents of the revolutionary new theories of design and construction and worked closely with many of the outstanding figures of the modern movement, including Le Corbusier and JJP Oud. Well to the fore of this group she exhibited chrome, steel tube and glass furniture in 1925 - the same year as Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer and well before Le Corbusier. Her next major contribution to design was in architecture. Encouraged by Le Corbusier and JJP Oud, she designed two houses in the Alpes Maritimes, one at Roquebrune (built 1927- 29), the other at Castellar (built 1932-34).
After the war and up to her death, she continued to work as a designer, on both major projects like the cultural and social centre which occupied her from 1946-47, and on a number of smaller furniture designs. In 1972 she was appointed a Royal Designer to Industry by the Royal Society of Art, London. Since 1978 the Museum of Modern Art in New York has in its permanent design collection the Adjustable Table E 1027.



More about 'Eileen Gray' in our blog

The Historia Supellexalis: "P" for Paris

Paris An Île; A Commune; A Context For all that the contemporary island of Paris has a long tradition of furniture production and usage, the greater part of that history, as can be read in the Bossu de Notre Dame, the oldest relic and most reliable witness of...

5 (New) Architecture & Design Exhibitions for February 2021

...Eileen Gray - Bard Graduate Center Gallery Online In 2020 the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, staged an exhibition of the work and life of the Irish/French designer and architect Eileen Gray; an exhibition which, invariably in 2020, not only found its run limited, but also couldn't be viewed by as international an audience as Eileen Gray deserves... In addition to detailed discussions on projects and works by Gray both well known and less well known, discussions primarily undertaken through concise texts and copious photographs, Eileen Gray @ the Bard Graduate Center Gallery Online also provides for a very succinct, if both thorough and broad, introduction to the person Eileen Gray and her biography; even if it is missing the story about Eileen Gray and Marisa Damia cruising the boulevards of 1920s Paris in Damia's convertible and with Damia's pet panther on the back seat...

Living in a Box. Design and Comics @ the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein

..."Wow" notes, Hana Sonnenschein in a scene from David Mazzucchelli's 2009 graphic novel Asterios Polyp, as she scans the eponymous professor's apartment, "Modern" And with its mix of works by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbuiser, Eileen Gray, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, etc, etc, etc, there is no arguing with the apartment's European inter-War and American mid-century modernist credentials... As is the comment by an Eileen Gray sideboard that "This place is just one big boys' club...

(smow) blog Design Calendar: August 9th 1878 – Happy Birthday Eileen Gray!

...There are of course some shinning examples of successful female modernist architects and designers who are accepted without the need of a male "qualifier" , the most notable being Eileen Gray... Born on August 9th 1878 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland as the youngest of five children to the Scottish landscape painter James McLaren Smith and his wife Eveleen Pounden, the 19th Lady Gray, Eileen Gray studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before moving to Paris in 1902...

new at smow: Eileen Gray

...That's my idea of good design" We recite this tale here principally to amuse ourselves, but also by way of a gentle introduction to the new smow Eileen Gray range... Although for many Gray's work will not as familiar as that of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe one should not underestimate the contribution made by Eileen Gray to the development furniture design in the 20th century...


All 'Eileen Gray' Posts