E-1027
Eileen Gray · 1926–1929
OVERVIEW
A small seaside house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, built 1926 to 1929 by Eileen Gray with Jean Badovici. The name is a cipher for the two of them: E for Eileen, 10 for the tenth letter, 2 and 7 for the second and seventh, B and G.
Gray designed the building and almost everything in it, including the adjustable E-1027 table, the Transat chair and a wall of built-in storage. It was her first work of architecture, made when she was already established as a furniture designer, and she was largely written out of its history for fifty years.
WHY IT MATTERS
A corrective to sterile minimalism: exact modernism designed around bodies and daily rituals.
CONTEXT
In 1938 and 1939 Le Corbusier painted eight murals on the walls, several of them on the nude figure, without Gray's permission and while she no longer lived there. She regarded it as defacement. He later built his own Cabanon on the slope immediately above the house and died swimming in the sea below it in 1965.
The site is now owned by the Conservatoire du Littoral and opened as Cap Moderne, managed with the Centre des monuments nationaux. The villa's restoration was completed in 2021.
WHAT TO NOTICE
- 01Furniture that belongs to the wallVery little is loose. Storage, beds and surfaces are built in and sized to the room, so the plan and the furnishing are one drawing rather than two.
- 02Stencilled instructionsGray painted words directly onto the fabric of the house: entrez lentement, defense de rire. The house tells you how to occupy it.
- 03The pilotis are modestIt sits on slender supports like a Corbusian villa, but low, small and hard against the slope. The modern language is used at domestic scale rather than manifesto scale.
- 04The murals are not hersWhere you see painted figures on the walls, you are looking at Le Corbusier over Gray. Reading them as part of the design reverses the authorship the house has spent decades recovering.
CONNECTIONS
- BUILT-IN EVERYTHINGMaison de Verre / Pierre Chareau + Bernard Bijvoet
Two houses of the same few years where the furniture is not placed in the room but made as part of it. Gray stencilled instructions on the walls; Chareau had Dalbet fabricate the fittings on site.
EXPLORE FURTHER
- OFFICIAL / Cap ModerneVilla E-1027
The site's own account of the building and its restoration.
- MUSEUM / Centre des monuments nationauxCap Moderne, Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier at Cap Martin
Practical visiting, and the official framing of the whole ensemble: villa, Cabanon and the Etoile de Mer between them.
- BOOK / Éditions du patrimoineCap Moderne. Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. Modernism by the sea
The monograph published by the site's own imprint.