Design Features Naomi Cleaver looks at Eileen Gray

Date Published:

10/06/2008

You may be familiar with her most famous designs, says Naomi Cleaver, but Eileen Gray's story is about more than just furniture.

Browse a gallery of Elieen Gray's designs >>

Late Recognition

Anyone with even a passing interest in modern design will be familiar with a certain circular, chrome-framed side table known as E1027, which has an ingenious pegging device to raise or lower the glass top; or the Bibendum chair, the name wittily acknowledging its rotund similarity to the Michelin Man; or the screen assembled from glossy brick-shaped panels.

These are all pieces designed by designer and architect Eileen Gray in the 1920s: classics often seen peppering bachelor loft apartments. And yet it wasn't until Eileen Gray was in her nineties that she finally received the widespread adulation she deserved.

Born to an Irish aristocratic family in 1878, she didn't actually need to work for a living and her approach to design was more that of an artist whose training began at The Slade, followed by a restless meander to the other side of Oxford Street where she happened upon a lacquer repair shop on Dean Street, engaging herself as a dogsbody to learn the lacquering art. On her return to her former Paris home, Mr Charles, the lacquer repair shop owner, put her in touch with a man who was to become both her teacher and colleague, Seizo Sugawara. A penniless student from Jahoji - a small village in the north of Japan, famous for its lacquer - he had come to Paris to restore the lacquer pieces Japan had sent for the Universal Exposition of 1900.