The house that Eileen built (original) (raw)

Just beneath the railway line at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the easterly end of the Cô,te d'Azur, there runs a narrow pathway. Here, in summer, the heat punches you with the smell of dog faeces dropped by the ridiculous breeds in which wealthy populations tend to indulge. At one end of the path, there is a telephone box, its cables conspicuously severed. Two large galvanised lids sit across a sewage outlet, and empty beer bottles and constellations of cigarette stubs suggest that this isolated ribbon of concrete offers an alternative nightlife to the casinos and restaurants of nearby Menton. A hundred feet below, but only intermittently visible through tangled overgrowth and chicken-wire fencing, the Mediterranean dashes against the honeycombed limestone rocks. Above, the Metrazur train, which runs the 150 miles between Ventimiglia and Marseilles, hugs the steep Provençal hills in its slow, littoral trundle. Only from the train would you glimpse the house that sits between the pathway and the sea.

Seventy-six years ago, Eileen Gray, an Anglo-Irish woman who dressed in superbly tailored trouser suits and a floppy bow-tie, parked her car next to the little station and walked down on to this path. A few minutes later, she turned off it and clambered down over crumbling stone walls, through the scattered Levant pines and bushes of wild rosemary and euphorbia, before coming upon a small terrace in the rocks. Gazing out across the Mediterranean, to the west, she saw the massive rock of Monte Carlo and part of the harbour peeping out from behind it. South and east, there was nothing but sea. For weeks, Gray had been scouring the coast for a suitable plot on which to build a house. Now, suddenly, she knew that this was the place.

Gray was then 47 and an accomplished designer. But her experience as an architect consisted of little more than a few small models in wood. Three years from this moment - years measured out in wheelbarrows and loneliness and an unshakeable sense of purpose - her quixotic venture would be completed: a "maison en bord de mer" that, for a brief period until the senators of the movement overwrote her contribution, placed her in the forefront of architectural modernism. This was Gray's "Invitation au voyage", the words taken from Baudelaire's prose poem of the same title and stencilled on a wall of the house: "It is there we must go to breathe, to dream, and to prolong the hours in an infinity of sensations."

Gray was born in 1878 at Brownswood House in County Wexford. Her mother, Eveleen, who was descended from the 15th-century peer Lord Gray, had run off to Italy, when she was 21, with James Maclaren Smith, a handsome painter 10 years her senior. They married in 1863, producing five children, of whom the last was Eileen. Her childhood was conventionally happy but, from an early age, she developed a sense of being unloved. Early photographs show her beautiful, feline features locked in a distant, wistful gaze, her lips turned down, even when smiling. She was extremely frightened as a child. Sometimes she would get up from her bed and steal down the dark corridor, quietly put two chairs in front of her mother's door and there fall asleep until the servants found her at dawn. Even in old age, she wrote: "I have instinctive fears, fears of ghosts, of people. I have tried in vain to conquer [them]."

If Gray was a frightened child, she was also physically courageous. She once dragged an invalid chair up a hill and raced down at breakneck speed. Later, she became one of the first women to fly in an aeroplane. She also loved cars and even investigated, at the age of 80, buying a Vespa. Although she inherited from her mother a sense of decorum, of rectitude even, from her artist father, who lived mostly in Switzerland and Italy, she acquired a burning need for independence - a need she was rarely to compromise in her long life.

A s Gray entered womanhood, she began to strain at the expectations of her class and upbringing (she disdained her title, "The Honourable", deeming it suitable only for operettas). Life had been spent between Brownswood and the family house in Kensington, her education imparted by a series of governesses. There had been a few short trips abroad to visit her father, or to board at a private school for a term. In 1900, the Boer war claimed her brother's life and natural causes her father's. Perhaps to distract her from grief, her mother took her to Paris to see the Exposition Universale. Its most celebrated pavilion was the Palace of Electricity, whose facade opened in a fan illuminated by 5,700 electric light-bulbs. It was this Gray fell in love with, the modernity of Paris, in contrast to the gloom of fog-filled London. She resolved to return.

Two years later, having attended, patchily, the Slade School of Fine Art, Gray settled in Paris with friends Kathleen Bruce (later Lady Scott, wife of Robert Scott, the explorer) and Jessie Gavin. "Les trois jolies anglaises", as they became known, enrolled at the Ecole Colarossi, an art school popular with foreign students, but soon changed to the more lively Académie Julian.

Recalling Gray years later, Bruce wrote of her as "fair, with wide-set, pale blue eyes, tall and of grand proportion, well-born and quaintly and beautifully dressed... the most romantic figure I had ever seen". Gavin evidently felt the same way, and by the end of 1902 their friendship had developed into an affair. Gavin had taken to wearing corduroys and a Norfolk jacket, and occasionally a wig and false moustache, telling Gray, "We'll... play chess in a cafe. I can take you to places where you can't go without a man."

Gray, at this time, was still wearing her thick auburn hair in the Edwardian style. Later, she had it cut into a bob and shed her corseted dresses for couture suits. She was always impeccably, discreetly elegant and shunned the more aggressive look of that clique of lesbians - Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Natalie Clifford Barney - with whom she was acquainted.

Gray had affairs with men as well as women, but never spoke of her sexuality, perhaps in deference to her mother, who hoped that she would marry and marry well (she did neither). But what characterised all her relationships, sexual or otherwise, was her intolerance of the intrusion into her interior life, whose secrets she stubbornly defended. She was, said American journalist and photographer Thérèse Bonney, "unassuming, unexplosive, entirely consecrated".

In 1905, Gray returned to London to be with her mother, who was unwell. One day, walking down Dean Street, she stumbled upon a lacquer repair shop and enquired if she could work there for a while. She spent most of the following months in the shop, watching and sometimes helping to rub down the many coats used to decorate screens and furniture. The next year, she returned to Paris armed with materials and the names of people who worked in the field. Soon, she met Seizo Sugawara, a penniless Japanese student in his 20s who had come to Paris to restore the lacquer pieces Japan had sent to the Exposition Universale. Gray asked him to teach her. Eventually, she mastered the medium to a perfection that assures her a place in history as one of the great lacquer artists.

Lacquer is an austere, obdurate material that can't be rushed. Sensuous and ascetic in equal measure, it suited Gray's temperament well. For weeks, months on end, she hardly left her workplace, her hands and arms developing the lacquer disease, a rash that is hard to heal. Mostly, she worked on wood (she was, one admirer said, an "alchimiste du bois"), and in time she achieved screens, tables, chairs and beds of great subtlety and richness. By 1912, she was producing pieces to commission for some of Paris's richest clients.

The dominant style in Paris in these years was art nouveau, and Gray's lacquer work has often been placed in its context of decadence (she would later refer to the work as "the sins of my past"). Yet her pieces were not so much a product of this style as an argument with it, a challenge to what she called "those ghastly drapes and curves of Tiffany and art nouveau".

Form, as many artists were now discovering, can be a prison. Suddenly, a series of break-outs was made: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Brancusi's The Kiss (1907), Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase (1912), Peter Behrens' AEG factory in Berlin, the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky's Firebird (1910), Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909). These works were not simply matters of private belief, but strategic incursions into the public consciousness, making "modernism" a recognisable state of mind. And Gray, in her desire to "simplify the figurative with almost geometrical designs", was very much a part of it.

Then there was war, the Great War, which Henri Gaudier-Brzeska called "the great remedy" and Ezra Pound the "cleansing" that would purge the capitalist world of all ills. The Futurists glorified it as "the world's only hygiene" and set off on their bicycles to join it. Most didn't come back. At the end of it, Gray, who had served as an ambulance driver before returning to England (she took with her Sugawara and as much lacquer material as she could squeeze into her car), came back to a Paris where the myth of the future had gone into shock. She resumed her lacquer work and was now called to exhibit it at the great salons. Newspapers began to write of her exquisite pieces, but she cared little for such recognition and began to feel uncomfortable with the class-bound opulence of her work. The question now was how to rebuild society after the devastation of war. How could art, design and, in particular, architecture ameliorate social crisis?

In L'Esprit Nouveau, Le Corbusier promised a new age animated by technology, mass production and geometric order. After the blood and mess of war, he was going to build a clean, white world for everyone. So where did Japanese resin fit in? For Corbusier, nowhere. "European lacquer, smart opium, reimported to the Far East, return freight," he wrote in June, 1924.

Gray had met Corbusier. She was introduced to him through Jean Badovici, a penniless young Romanian architect who shared a garret with the Greek journalist Christian Zervos. In 1923, they published the first issue of L'Architecture Vivante, which soon became the most distinguished magazine of its kind. Badovici saw in Gray a woman of both great artistic talent and independent wealth, who might be able to help him put his creative ideas into practice. She, in turn, was much taken by his enthusiasm and by his insistence that she should build, should stop frittering away her time and "make a door that will last".

As Gray climbed back up to the footpath at Roquebrune that day in 1925, she knew for certain that she was going to build. She immediately called Badovici in Paris. He came down, loved the place, and Gray bought it in his name. They were, by this time, lovers. She returned to Paris and began to make architectural plans. Over the next months, she travelled down to Roquebrune several times, before finally presenting Badovici with a model for his "little refuge". At his suggestion, she re-drew the plan to include pilotis, concrete columns that would elevate the main living space. By early 1926, she was ready to start.

Taking a little flat in Roquebrune, Gray hired a mason and two assistants. For the next three years, she remained on or near the site, following her design exactly, "determined not to make any compromises". She saw hardly anyone for months on end, except for the locals who wandered down to see what this "mad Englishwoman" was doing. The work was hard: all the material had to be brought to the site by wheelbarrow. There was no one to talk to and she took most of her meals alone. At the end of each day, she was lonely and tired, her only reward a swim in the crystal clear sea.

Occasionally, Badovici came down to give advice. It was always clear that the "maison en bord de mer" was to be his: the land had been purchased in his name, and the structure and furnishings, all designed by Gray, were consciously developed in response to his personal needs. Gray named the house E.1027. "E" for "Eileen", 10 for the letter "J", 2 for "B" and 7 for "G" - "Eileen Jean Badovici Gray". Fittingly, for someone so private, in the very act of announcing their collaboration, she managed to conceal it in code.

The site Gray had chosen was difficult terrain, but she had decided to let the house embrace the natural contours of the land. It consisted of a large living room, extended by a terrace, and two main bedrooms. A spiral staircase linked the two floors (and extended to the flat roof, Badovici's idea) and the lower floor was divided between a guest bedroom and two tiny cells for a maid and children (not having any, Gray worked on the principle that the best children were those who were not seen). Gray had spent months studying the light and wind direction to make best use of natural elements, and the distinction between outside and inside was deliberately dissipated.

Everything recalled the architecture of boats. "Entering a house is like... the sensation of pleasure when one arrives with a boat in a harbour, the feeling of being enclosed but free to circulate," Gray said. Taut sailcloth membranes on the terrace's metal railings offered protection from the sun and her "Transat" deckchairs (in reference to the ocean-liner company Transatlantique) suggested a cruise; inside, wall-mounted headboards for the beds included compartments for cushions, books, a hot-water bottle, while supporting lights, clocks and extending table-tops, as in a cabin. There were also hidden areas for storage - or secrets. If a house is a metaphor for a life, then these layers of interiors within interiors spoke of Gray's habit of stowing away her most precious possession, her inner life. There was wit, too: life-preservers hung from the balcony deck, too far from the water to be of any use. But seen from the sea, they added to the impression of the house as a ship that had glided through the rocky incline until it had come to anchor, a stanza in the odyssey of modernism.

In many aspects, this was a manifesto house formulated on the basis of Corbusier's famous "Five Points of the New Architecture", which stipulated a house that "stands on pilotis", where "the roof is reached via a staircase", "open-plan living is achieved by the mixture of free-standing and fixed walls", "the windows are oriented horizontally" and "the south window creates an open facade". It was also influenced by Corbusier's interest in creating the "maison minimum", a small, prototype house that could be adapted and multiplied to help ease the housing shortage resulting from the war. Gray's use of prefabricated elements shows an engagement with these ideas, but if she was influenced by Corbusier's teachings, she was not wholly acquiescent. Deviating from his famous dictum, she wrote: "A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. [It is] a living organism in which each of the inhabitants could... find total independence and an atmosphere of solitude and concentration."

The house was read first through its relationship with the body. Gray strove to heighten bodily awareness, providing a profusion of glinting materials in the bathroom - tiled walls, folding mirrors, porcelain sinks - whose cool surfaces provided a respite from the relentless Mediterranean sun. Such material palpability invoked a sense of the erotic, the sensual. "The poverty of modern architecture stems from the atrophy of sensuality," Gray said. "Everything is dominated by reason in order to create amazement without proper research." (In some vital aspects, she fell short of her own standard of "research". The kitchen, for instance, was sadly neglected, probably because its inadequacies didn't affect her. She couldn't boil an egg and always had a maid to deal with domestic duties.)

There was a further ironic commentary on the contemporary obsession with machine imagery. Gray used Corbusian stencils to caption the house for the uninitiated: in the entrance, "Défense de rire" and "Entrez lentement"; next to the mirrors in the guest room, "Madame petite et coquette" and "Monsieur qui aime se regarder la nuque". The house, Gray said, must "be useful for comfort and for aiding in joie de vivre". Such playfulness was seen in Gray's Bibendum chair, modelled on the Michelin tyre man, and in the swivelling arm of a bedside table. At a time when modernism's dominant tone was one of muscular religiosity, Gray was puncturing its inflated seriousness.

She went further. When, that year, Badovici devoted a special issue of L'Architecture Vivante to the house, he quoted Gray attacking architects who confused "simplicity" with "simplification" and mistook "formulas" for life itself. "The world is full of living allusions, living symmetries, hard to find, but real... Their wish for rigid precision has made them neglect the beauty of all these forms: disks, cylinders, wavy and zigzag lines, ellipsoidal lines, which are like straight lines in motion. Avant-garde architecture has no soul."

Gray had given her soul to this house. And, for a while, she was to enjoy her achievement. She spent several summers here, sometimes with Badovici, sometimes alone. In 1937, Corbusier visited for the first time. That summer, he came often for tea with his wife, as did Fernand Léger. There was much conversation, practical jokes and laughter. But Gray's relationship with Badovici was becoming strained. He was 14 years her junior, drank heavily and was a great womaniser. She talked later of his "lies and silliness". So she did what she always did. She moved on. "One must never look for happiness," she once mused. "It passes you on your way, but always in the opposite direction. Sometimes I recognised it."

Later that summer, Corbusier wrote: "I am so happy to tell you how much those few days spent in your house have made me appreciate the rare spirit which dictates all the organisation inside and outside. A rare spirit which has given the modern furniture and installations such a dignified, charming, and witty shape." Gray was enormously proud of this: Corbusier was acknowledging that it was the house she had built.

But in 1938, the situation turned: Corbusier again visited the house, but this time he stripped naked and started painting her blank walls with murals. He did not seek Gray's permission and it was an act she deeply resented. He covered her clear and consciously low-key house with overtly sexual, garish paintings (eight altogether) in what she called "an act of vandalism".

Gray continued to see Badovici, with whom she remained on good terms, but she wouldn't visit him at E.1027, preferring to meet for a quiet lunch nearby. She had already built a new house for herself in the village of Castellar and was to be seen speeding around the Provençal roads in a little MG, usually accompanied by her maid. She did little or no lacquer work now, preferring to work on new architectural designs (she was to realise only one more project in her lifetime) and on designing furniture.

Then war. Again. As a resident alien, Gray was forbidden to live near the sea, so she moved inland to Lourmarin, a little town in the Vaucluse region. Here she drew and made sculptures, using odd bits and pieces, and scribbled notes on architecture in a little brown book. In 1944, her house at Castellar was ransacked and a flat she had rented before the war in St-Tropez was blown apart by German shelling. She lost most of her furniture and designs - decades of work destroyed. E.1027, meanwhile, had been occupied by Italian, then German soldiers, who used one of Corbusier's murals for target practice.

After the German retreat, Gray returned to Paris, but her love of the South of France was undiminished. In 1953, she started converting an old cabanon near St-Tropez. She was now 75, but as determined as she had been when she built E.1027. She camped out in the half-finished house for weeks on end, sleeping on a camp bed with the rain falling through the roof. By the time it was finished, she was 80 and Badovici was dead. Gray arranged his funeral. She had been a catalyst for his architectural ambitions, advising him on elevations for his sole independent project, a house he designed in the late 30s on Paris's Right Bank. Yet when the Union des Artistes Moderne arranged a memorial exhibition in his honour at the first Triennale of Contemporary French Art in Paris, Gray's offer to assist was rejected and E.1027 attributed to "Jean Badovici with the collaboration of Eileen Gray for the furniture".

Corbusier, who knew this was a misattribution, did nothing to correct the error. Indeed, determined to preserve the house and his frescoes, he actively promoted the impression that Badovici was its creator. In 1950, he had acquired a small plot of land next to E.1027, on which he built La Baraque, a tiny wooden shack. Then, shortly before Badovici's death, he had erected a "hostel" on the land directly overlooking the villa. Elevated on pilotis, this intrusive, two-storey building not only destroyed the visual isolation of E.1027, but also operated, together with his cabanon, to situate Gray's masterpiece within a Corbusian frame.

For four years after Badovici's death, E.1027 languished. As it had been registered in his name, his sister was now the legal heir, but she was stuck in Romania and prohibited from owning property abroad. In 1960, Corbusier successfully solicited a buyer, a wealthy Swiss widow called Marie-Louise Schelbert. Telephoning her in Zurich, he told her to "bring all the money you can get hold of, and a hat!" She went to Roquebrune and found the house in a miserable state, but decided to buy it anyway. The house was auctioned at Menton in June 1960 and the contract of sale signed between Schelbert and a "representative" for Badovici's sister (he was, in fact, acting for the Romanian government, which pocketed the proceeds). Gray tried to retrieve some furniture but was, she later said, "prevented". She could never again be persuaded to visit her "maison en bord de mer".

E.1027 was now saved. Schelbert made several alterations, but was on the whole a decent custodian of Gray's house, even if she had never heard of her. Corbusier, by now recognised as the architectural titan of his age, was often there, spending the summer in his shack while members of his burgeoning architectural practice stayed in the "hostel" behind the villa. On August 27, 1965, he walked down the steps that had been rudely carved out of the rocks below the house, and lowered himself into the water. Since the death of his wife Yvonne two years earlier, he had been drinking heavily and had gained weight. He swam for a while, then staggered out of the water, his face riven with pain. And there he died, of a massive heart attack. Shortly after, the little footpath was designated "Promenade Le Corbusier". And thus he still looms as a presence, looking down, literally, on Gray's work.

Sometime in 1980, in the middle of the night, a man parked a lorry next to Roquebrune station and made his way down the footpath to the house. Opening the door with a key, he proceeded to remove most of Gray's furniture to the lorry, before driving to Zurich. His name was Heinz Peter Kägi and he was Schelbert's physician. Three days later, she was found dead in her apartment. Kägi produced documents to show that he had purchased the house from Schelbert in 1974, but her children, suspicious that he might have had a hand in her death, pursued legal means to block the change of ownership. Their lawsuit was unsuccessful and Kägi moved into the house, selling off the remaining furniture at auctions handled by Sotheby's in Monaco. When the Centre Georges Pompidou arranged separately to buy some of the furniture, it was with the understanding that Kägi would use the proceeds to restore the villa, but he made no effort to do so.

Under Kägi's ownership, E.1027 deteriorated rapidly. Rumours spread that the villa was now a kind of orgy den, with Kägi picking up local boys and offering them drugs and booze. On August 22, 1996, an argument broke out and Kägi was stabbed with a long knife and left bleeding to death on the floor of the living room. His assailants were two vagrants he had taken into the house in exchange for work on the garden. They had demanded money for their labours but he'd refused to pay, so they took his life. After stealing his car and passport, they made for the Swiss border, where they were arrested and charged with his murder, for which they received life sentences.

After Kägi's death, the villa was squatted and vandalised. Surprisingly, Corbusier's frescoes survived. In any case, this mutilation finally prompted official efforts to save the villa, which was reclassified a full "monument historique" in November 1998 (in 1975 it had been included on France's supplementary inventory of historic monuments). Ironically, the murals were its best-preserved aspect; without them, the house would undoubtedly have been left to rot.

The job of securing the villa for posterity has fallen to Renaud Barrès, an architect in his mid-30s who admires Gray and reveres Corbusier. As a child, he spent summers with his father in Corbusier's "hostel". Now, as official guardian of the site, he enjoys the right to stay in Corbusier's cabanon, used by the architect from 1954 until his death. This stark wooden shack is highly ascetic, with none of the sensuality of Gray's building. It, too, has a mural, whose most prominent feature is an erect penis Barrès calls "the big dick".

Barrès has a vision for E.1027. It will be restored (though there doesn't seem to be any money) and preserved, together with Corbusier's buildings, as a study centre for architects, with public access offered for a limited period each year. When pushed for details of funding and schedules, Barrès is vague. In June 1999, Norman Foster and Partners submitted preliminary plans for the construction of a villa on St Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Noting that the region hosts some of the world's finest examples of domestic modernist architecture, the proposal specifically refers to E.1027 as "associating modernism with the traditions of the Mediterranean". On seeing the plans, Barrès at once wrote to Foster, seeking his support in saving the villa. He has not yet had a reply. It seems that architects, as much as the corrosive winds that whip up from the sea, have been unkind to the dreams of Gray.

As I tour her house with Barrès, I have the strong sensation of visiting a shipwreck. Here, beached on the shores of conservation and heritage bureaucracy, the bitter infighting of executors and lawyers, lies the skeletal frame of a once noble vessel. The concrete is crumbling, exposing long sections of iron support rods. The stairway leading to the raised deck is leaning perilously to one side. All but a few windows are smashed, the rude crisscross of masking tape and plastic sheeting flapping in the breeze. Stripped of its fixtures and fittings, the villa's walls cast the shadow of the past and no longer the light of the future. Like all shipwrecks, the ghosts of the past linger. Ghosts that would have frightened Gray.

She died in Paris, after a fall, on the morning of Sunday, October 31, 1976. She was 98. French radio announced her death that evening. She was buried the following week at the Père Lachaise cemetery, in a simple grave numbered 17616. "There is a path which leads upward and there is a path which leads downward. Both are one and the same," she once said. A suitable epitaph

Eileen Gray, by Caroline Constant, is published by Phaidon, priced £39.95. Peter Adam's biography, Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer, is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £16.95. To order a copy of either book, with free first-class p&p, call 0870 066 7979.