Around 1921, at the age of 43, the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray, whose partners had previously all been women, met the much younger, penniless, architectural critic Jean Badovici and fell in love.
They decided to build a house together in the south of France.
Although their hideaway, perched on the side of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, was built very much in the International Style, Gray brought a femininity to its design that was lacking in the architecture of her male counterparts. She detested Le Corbusier’s statement that a house was “a machine for living in” and she made sure that her house was much more than a functional home. Firmness yes, commodity yes, but mostly delight.
E for Eileen, 10 for J, 2 for B, and 7 for G. Eileen, Jean Badovici, Gray.
Two years after the house was completed, Gray split up with Badovici and transferred ownership to him. It was clear that the house and her relationship with him were inseparable
Meanwhile, she began building another house several kilometres inland, where she would live alone.
Badovici was a close friend of Le Corbusier, and often invited him to stay at the house for long periods. Corbusier was obsessed by the house and wanted to make his own mark on it. With Badovici’s approval, he painted colourful, sexually graphic murals throughout the house. It was not until after WW2 that Gray found out about this. She was deeply offended, labelled it an act of male vandalism and demanded that the walls be reinstated to their original white. But the murals remained and she never returned to the house.
Later Le Corbusier would try to buy the house and even passed it off as his own design but when that failed he contrarily built a log cabin, on an adjacent plot. It was near here that he died of a heart attack while swimming in 1965.
The history of the house is fascinating, but this ernest film is lacking in any of the joy which the house must have evoked. Instead of a simple narrative we are presented with a formal dramatisation by three actors, playing Gray, (Natalie Radmall-Quirke) Badovici (Axel Moustache) and Le Corbusier (Charles Morillon) either on an stage set or in the house itself.
This contrived play is thankfully intercut with beautiful visual details of the house and engaging documentary footage about Gray and her amazing furniture designs, how she was forgotten, how she was rediscovered, how the house was left to decay, and how the house was finally restored. The film ends in a sweet interview with the real Eileen Gray in her nineties, still designing in her Paris studio.
| Robert Malcolm is an Interior Designer who relocated from London to his home town of Edinburgh in 2019. Under the pen name of Bobby Burns he had his first novel, a gay erotic thriller called Bone Island published by Homofactus Press in 2011. |
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