After her father’s death in 1900, Gray moved to Paris with two friends from the Slade, Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce, and continued her studies at the Académie Julian and the École Colarossi. ![]() He also allowed Gray to enrol at the Slade School of Art in London to study painting. Gray's father, James Maclaren Gray, was a keen amateur artist who encouraged her creative talent by taking her with him on painting tours of Italy and Switzerland. ![]() Her childhood was divided between the family’s houses there and in London’s South Kensington. The youngest of five children in a wealthy Scottish-Irish family, Eileen Gray was born in 1878 near the Irish market town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Instead, her privileged background, like her gender, left her isolated. Neither did she have the advantage of working with a powerful male mentor, like most of the other women who made an impact on early 20th century design – such as Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier, then Jean Prouvé Anni Albers with her husband Josef or Lilly Reich with Mies Van Der Röhe – nor did Gray share a trajectory with other designers, either by studying at the same schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany, or as an apprentice in a studio like Le Corbusier’s in Paris. Her voluptuous leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair and clinically chic E-1027 glass and tubular steel table are now as familiar as icons of the International Style as Le Corbusier and Perriand’s classic Grand Confort club chairs, yet for most of her career she was relegated to obscurity by the same proud singularity that makes her work so prized today.Īs a woman, Eileen Gray was denied access to the supportive networks from which her male contemporaries benefited. Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies Van Der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals. At a time when other leading designers were almost all male and mostly members of one movement or another – whether a loose grouping like De Stijl in the Netherlands, or a formal one such as the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – she remained stalwartly independent. ‘But is it not rather that she stands alone, unique, the champion of a singularly free method of expression.’Įileen Gray was to ‘stand alone’ throughout her career first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer and finally as an architect. ‘Influenced by the modernists is Miss Gray’s art, so they say’ it began. In the August 1917 issue of British Vogue magazine, a writer described the work of Miss Gray, a lacquer artist who had fled her home in Paris to seek refuge in London during World War I. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco. ![]() “This all excites me very much-allowing the senses to drive a space.Neglected for most of her career, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. As of lately we are paying close attention to how design has the ability to create an energy,” says Erick Garcia of the Los Angeles-based design firm Maison Trouvaille. “We have been forced to slow down and spend time in our homes-this drives a strong desire to really create a space that reflects both visually and affectionately what it is we are feeling. ![]() So is it any wonder that in 2022-our third consecutive year in a global pandemic-the top interior design trends are again focused on making us feel emotionally at ease? “There is more and more research that shows the direct influence that our homes have, not only on our moods, but our overall health and well-being,” interior designer Timothy Corrigan of Timothy Corrigan Inc. For millennia, interior design trends have been used as aesthetic aids in our attempts to find some sort of inner peace: take the ancient Chinese art of feng shui, where spatial positioning corresponds with energy flow, or wabi sabi, the Japanese practice of embracing an imperfections, or ancient Rome's fondness for using earth-tone colors and geometric patterns in order to mimic the harmony of nature.
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