But Is It Art: Eileen Gray's White House
A modernist masterpiece on the French Riviera is plagued by controversy
This is the first essay in a series called But Is It Art. There's no question mark because it's not really a question, and there are no answers. Just some art-related stories.
The 1929 Modernist villa known as E-1027 is perched on the edge of the Mediterranean, in the French Riviera. It was designed by self-taught Irish architect Eileen Gray as a peaceful retreat for herself and her lover, Jean Badovici. But despite its romantic conception, the house itself was plagued by controversy, becoming the scene of drug-fuelled orgies, Nazi target practice, and even the murder of one of the later owners, and it slowly deteriorated until restoration began more than twenty years after its creator died.
Photo from Wikipedia
Eileen Gray was a skilled, unique designer with an impressive legacy as a craftsperson, and architect. Her designs are so coveted by collectors that her Dragon’s Armchair, a small, brown chair with carved serpents’ arms, set an auction record for 20th-century furniture when it was sold to an anonymous bidder for 22 million euros.
However the story that surrounds her Modernist masterpiece, the villa E-1027 is sordid, controversial, and even fatal for some who were involved with the house. Central to the legend of E-1027 is not just that it was the first modernist house by a woman architect, but that that other, far more famous modernist architect, Le Corbusier, became obsessed with it to the point of coveting it, vandalising it, building his own house right next door, and ultimately drowning on the coast nearby.
Eileen Gray. Photo: NY Times
Eileen Gray was born in 1878 into an aristocratic family in Ireland, but she spent most of her adult life in France. She was one of five children, and strained against the expectations of her class, rejecting her title of “The Honourable.” In her early twenties her mother took her to France to see the Paris Exposition, which Eileen fell in love with. For a while she studied fine arts at the Bohemian Slade School in London, before moving to Paris. She studied the art of lacquer with a Japanese man named Seizo Sugawara. She was one of the first women in Paris to get her licence, and during the first world war she served as an ambulance driver before returning to England, with her lacquer equipment and her teacher, Sugawara, in tow. When the war was over, she returned to Paris and resumed her lacquer work, which was then exhibited at the great salons.
Le Corbusier, Yvonne Gallis, and Jean Badovici. Photo by Eileen Gray
She met Romanian architect Jean Badovici in 1921, when she was in the process of setting up her gallery and they became lovers, on and off. She was 43 and he was 28. He became the editor of an influential architecture magazine after they met, and in 1929 he devoted an entire issue to E-1027.
The name, E-1027, was coded. Obscurely, numerically romantic. The E stood for Eileen, of course. The ten was for J, the 10th letter of the alphabet, Jean's initial. Two for B, the second letter of the alphabet - for Badovici. Then finally seven: G, the 7th letter, for Gray. Their names were intertwined, Eileen’s initials book-ending her lover’s.
Photo by Manuel Bougot
E-1027 is a long, rectangular white house, on the coast of the South of France. It is an intentionally remote location, and the construction work was hard and lonely. All the materials had to be brought to the site by wheelbarrow. Eileen supervised the build from a small flat in the nearby town of Roquebrune for three years, hiring a mason and two assistants. She found the site after scouring the coast for weeks, via a narrow path by the railway line that hugged the steep Provençal hills. She later stencilled words from a Baudelaire poem 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."
View towards Monaco from the villa's roof. Photo by Médiéval AFDP
The site was difficult terrain, but Eileen fell in love with its privacy, wildness and the expansive ocean crashing on the limestone rocks below. The house is perched on the hill, with two floors edging the contours of the land. The larger, upper floor consists of a living room with a terrace, and two main bedrooms. The bottom floor, smaller by way of the encroaching slope of the hill, had a guest bedroom and two small rooms for a maid and children, although neither she nor Badovici had, or would have, any children. She had studied the light and wind direction of the location in order to optimise the natural elements and to thoroughly integrate the interior of the house with the beauty and sensation of the outdoors.
Photo by Manuel Bougot
Elements of the house spoke to the architecture of boats, as befitting the coastal location. Sailcloths were stretched taut over the terrace railings, offering protection from the fierce Mediterranean sun, as well as an added modicum of privacy. She designed deckchairs which were named “Transat” in reference to the shipping company Transatlantique, also known as the French Line. In the bedrooms, wall mounted headboards and cupboards suggest a cabin in a boat. Life preservers hang from the balcony, although they are too far from the sea to be useful. Eileen said, "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," and the house evokes an impression of an industrial “ocean-liner” aesthetic, a boat anchoring amongst the hills.
Photo by Manuel Bougot
A spiral staircase cast in metal and glass is my favourite element of the house. It links the two floors and the flat roof, which is a feature of Modernist architecture. The house aligns with Le Corbusier’s Five Points of a New Architecture, detailed in his 1923 book, though E-1027 was built before his famous Villa Savoye. The five points, or principles are: one: pilotis - a grid of reinforced concrete columns that bear the structural load instead of supporting walls bearing the load, two: the absence of which allows for an open floor plan, three: horizontal ribbon windows that cut the facade along its length, providing even light; four: roof gardens or terraces; and five: the free design of the facade, which separates the exterior appearance from the structural function, thus releasing it from those structural constraints.
Photo by Manuel Bougot
Although Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, built 3 years after E-1027, is considered a masterpiece of 20th century architecture, and the epitome of his five points, it was plagued by issues that rendered it uninhabitable. The roof leaked everywhere, the skylight was so noisy it prevented the occupants from sleeping, and it suffered substantial heat-loss due to the large windows. The owners wrote letters of complaints to Le Corbusier after the Villa Savoye was completed, which he ignored until they threatened to take him to court. Le Corbusier wrote that “a house is a machine for living in,” if this is so, the Villa Savoye was a machine that malfunctioned.
Villa Savoye. Photo from Wikipedia
Meanwhile, Eileen Gray’s E-1027 used Le Corbusier’s theories and built a house that was integrated with its surroundings and comfortable to live in. Although it matched the five Modernist principles, Eileen designed E-1027 to be experienced, with a careful awareness of how people might move through the space. In contrast to Le Corbusier’s claim of house-as-machine, 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 drawing room in Villa E-1027, with the Bibendum chair, and one of Le Corbusier's graffiti murals. Photo by Manuel Bougot
Eileen created loose and built-in furniture for the house, with close attention to their usefulness as well as appearance. There was a tea trolley with a cork surface, to reduce the noise made by rattling cups, and a chair called the Bibendum, a semi-circular armchair with thick, squishy tubes that make up the back and arms. A minimalist height-adjustable steel and glass table became one of her most famous designs. She built a range of cupboards and clever storage units to maximise the efficiency of the small house, taking into consideration things like an arrangement of mirrors that would allow you to see the back of your head, and carefully integrating electrical fittings, lights, and radiators.
Guest bedroom. Photo by Manuel Bougot
In the summer of 1937 Le Corbusier visited E-1027 with his wife Yvonne. He later 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."
By the time he visited again in 1938, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici had broken up for good, and Le Corbusier stripped naked and painted his now-infamous murals on the blank walls of the house. There is a photo of him, as he is painting, wearing only his signature round glasses, with a large, jagged scar on his thigh.
Le Corbusier vandalising Eileen Gray's villa.
Allowing his friend “Corbu” to paint lurid, sexualised murals on Eileen’s pristine blank walls was a deep betrayal on Badovici’s part. Eileen called it an act of vandalism, but despite her outrage, Badovici sent a letter to Le Corbusier saying, "Your frescoes [are] more luminous and beautiful than ever.” Although Badovici and Eileen remained on good terms until his death, she refused to enter the house, meeting instead for lunch nearby.
There are eight murals in total, in garish colours, and a Cubist style, although Le Corbusier had planned more. He declared: "I also have a furious desire to soil walls: ten compositions are ready, enough to smear everything.” Architecture critic Rowan Moore likened the mural painting to “a dog urinating over territory.” Earlier, in 1932, Le Corbusier had written to a friend, saying, “I admit the mural not to enhance a wall, but on the contrary, as a means to violently destroy the wall, to remove from it all sense of stability, of weight.’’
One of the murals has a swastika inscribed on the chest of one of the women. Some literature claims Le Corbusier was an anti-Semite and a fascist, and he was contracted to the Vichy regime in the early 1940s, drawing up city plans for Algiers. One of the curators of a retrospective exhibition at France’s Centre Pompidou, says the quotations regarding racism or fascism were from extracts of Le Corbusier’s private correspondence, that he never made any public declaration against Jews. and he was also considered a communist because he was in contact with architects who were close to communism. Privately expressed fascism is still fascism, though. In a 2015 BBC article, Dr Caroline Levitt said that it wasn’t unusual for artists from that period to be labelled both communist and fascist. She said that, "He was trying to wipe out the troubled art of a troubled era, and suggest a life of order and clarity. That's very appropriable by the Right. But it was also about shaking up the established ideas of the bourgeoisie, which is more akin to ideas of the Left."
Regardless of Le Corbusier’s political leanings, and Eileen Gray’s, of which little is known, E-1027 was briefly occupied during World War II by Italian and German soldiers, who used the mural containing the swastika as target practice. Eileen’s other homes were further destroyed by the German Army - the home she’d designed and built in Castellar after E-1027, the Tempe à Pailla, was ransacked, and her flat in Menton was bombed. Most of her work over the previous decades was destroyed, both furniture and designs.
Built-in cupboards.
Le Corbusier continued to be obsessed with E-1027, and purchased an adjacent piece of land, building a small cabin in 1954, which he would frequently stay in. Notably, the Cabanon des Vacances is the only building he built for himself.
Badovici died in 1956, and the house languished for four years. His sister, an elderly nun, inherited it, but she was in Romania, and wasn’t permitted to own property abroad. Le Corbusier, butting in again, conducted an extraordinary campaign to solicit a buyer, writing over a hundred detailed and elaborate letters to the pastor in charge of selling the house, to the notary in Cap Martin who was trying to establish the value of the house, and to friends in Switzerland trying to arrange a buyer, before it was finally purchased by a wealthy Swiss architect called Marie-Louise Schelbert. Eileen Gray tried to recover some of the furniture but was prevented from doing so.
The furniture ended up being removed in 1980, in the middle of the night, by a man with a lorry and a key. This must have taken some effort, as the house was inaccessible by car. His name was Heinz Peter Kägi and he presumably had a key because he was Schelbert’s physician. He drove the furniture to Zurich, Switzerland, which today is 6-7 hours drive away. Three days later, Marie-Louise Schelbert was found dead in her apartment in Zurich. Kägi claimed to have purchased the house years earlier, but Schelbert’s children were suspicious that he may have had a hand in her death, and pursued a lawsuit to block the change of ownership. They were unsuccessful, and Kägi moved in.
The open-air kitchen. Photo by Manuel Bougot
The condition of E-1027 deteriorated, and there were rumours that it was used as a drug den, and that Kägi would pick up local boys for orgies, offering them drugs and alcohol. These are just rumours though, perhaps inspired by homophobia. In 1996, an argument broke out between Kägi and two men. Accounts differ as to motivation: some say it was a “sex tryst gone awry,” some say Kägi refused to pay when they demanded money for their work in the garden. The men stabbed him with a long knife and he bled to death on the floor of E-1027’s living room. The men were arrested on the Swiss border, after fleeing with Kägi’s car and passport, and received life sentences. If Kägi was indeed responsible for Marie-Louise Schelbert’s death 16 years earlier, it seems karmic, or at least ironic, that he too would be murdered, and in the house itself, no less.
It also seems… appropriate, somehow, that Le Corbusier died near E-1027. In 1965, aged 77, he died while swimming in the ocean, against his doctor’s orders. It is believed he had a heart attack, and his body later washed up on shore.
In 2014, the Cap Moderne was set up to manage E-1027, Le Corbusier’s cabanon, and the other buildings around them. Eileen’s house had been bought by the Conservatoire du littoral in 1999 in a severely degraded condition, but major restoration work has now been carried out on the site, and small guided tours are conducted. Work on the house has been undertaken with an emphasis on conserving the villa’s original spirit, despite the fragility of some features, such as the tiled floors and the large picture window in the living room.
It is not strictly original as per Eileen’s designs, however, as Le Corbusier’s murals have also been retained. Although controversial, they are considered to embody a key phase in the history of the villa. Ironically, the murals were possibly the best-preserved aspect of the house, before restorations began, and without them the house may have been left to rot.
Photo by Tim Benton
Eileen Gray died in the country she loved in 1976, after a fall. She was 98 years old. She is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, in a grave numbered 17616, which is not a code for anything. She once wrote: "One must never look for happiness. It passes you on your way, but always in the opposite direction. Sometimes I recognised it."
Further reading:
The Sordid Saga of Eileen Gray’s Iconic E-1027 House | Metropolis Mag
Eileen Gray, Freed From Seclusion | New York Times
Eileen Gray’s E1027: a lost legend of 20th-century architecture is resurrected | The Guardian
A House by the Sea | Cap Moderne
The Tortured History of Eileen Gray’s Modern Gem | New York Times
Eileen Gray: a life restored | The Economist
The house that Eileen built | The Guardian
Restoring Eileen Gray's E-1027 | Architect magazine
Eileen Gray’s E1027: a lost legend of 20th-century architecture is resurrected | The Guardian