Eileen Gray: a life restored
She should be world-famous for her innovative designs – and would be, had Le Corbusier not intervened. But, as Michael Watts reports, her story now has a happy ending, thanks partly to a new film
By Michael Watts
The undoubted star of a new movie called “The Price of Desire” is not a person but a house, a real house, a magical house, in the South of France: a whitewashed Modernist villa with a perfectly Modernist name, E.1027. Built into a cliff at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur, it sits on columns, or pilotis, with a flat roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. At its centre is a spiral staircase, like a ship’s companionway, as if the house were setting sail across the Mediterranean; but its interior is comfortable and ingenious in its illusion of space. Beds fold into walls, a table becomes a desk, and the hall has witty instructions for visitors—entrez lentement and défense de rire.
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