Eileen Gray Screen sells for €1.3m

PARAVENT 'BRIQUES', c. 1923-1925

I have long championed the Irish Designer Eileen Gray who greatly influenced 20th Century Design and Architecture at the creative nexus of the Modern Movement. Her iconic seaside villa E-1027 at Roquebrune Cap Martin obsessed the architect Le Corbusier who died of a heart attack swimming in the sea within sight of it. The furniture and fittings she designed for E-1027, an apartment on the Rue Lota in Paris and her own apartment on Rue Bonaparte are classics of 20th Century Design. Her contribution was largely unsung before her death in 1976 but now art connoisseurs are paying huge sums for original examples of her work. Last year a small armchair designed by her achieved the highest prices ever for a piece of 20th Century furniture and yesterday at Christie’s in Paris other pieces achieved truly remarkable prices.


Eileen Gray 1879 - 1976

Eileen Gray is regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco. 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. 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 Perriands 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. From her early lacquer work to design classics like the Bibendum chair and her architectural masterpiece, E-1027, Eileen Gray's work was as individual as it was exciting.


FAUTEUIL 'TRANSAT', c. 1926-1930

Eileen Gray was an extraordinary character, single-minded and individualistic, who managed to capture and express in her own way the prevailing spirit of the age in design through the first decades of the 20th century. She was celebrated in February 2009 during the auction of the Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé collections at the Grand Palais when her remarkable ‘Serpents’ chair, circa 1917-1919, originally from the collections of fashionable milliner Suzanne Talbot and the quintessence of her work in lacquer, achieved the record sum of €21 million.


Fauteuil aux Serpents


Table d'appoint pour E-1027

Eileen Gray arrived in Paris in 1902, studying at the Académie Colorassi and the Académie Julian before exploring the medium of lacquer after her curiosity was sparked by a visit to a small atelier in Soho. She met Japanese artist Seizo Sugarawa with whom she would work for a number of years. An enigmatic personality, as private as she was determined, she chose in the early 1920s to move away from the highly refined lacquer work of her early days, in order to focus on more functionalist designs in metal, glass and painted wood, inspired at first by the Modernist ideas of the Dutch De Stjil movement.


Eileen Gray in her rue de Bonaparte apartment with the Brick Screen in 1970

Her creativity and vision found expression in new forms, such as the ‘Brick’ screen – developed from the panels she used in the hallway of the apartment of Suzanne Talbot on Rue de Lota, circa 1922. The black-lacquered screen presented here was part of her personal furnishing and featured in her apartment on Rue Bonaparte. Other examples of her work include the floor light, the black and yellow base of which resembles a piece of Constructivist architecture, again made for her own use, or the ‘Transat’ armchair, circa 1925, in black lacquer with seat made from coated canvas, formerly the property of her friend and collaborator architect Jean Badovici, founder of the avant-garde magazine L’Architecture Vivante, 1923.


‘Aéroplane’ ceiling light

Her unique inspiration can be seen in her ‘Aéroplane’ ceiling light, circa 1925-28, constructed like an abstract sculpture from metal elements and two sheets of glass, one white, one blue. This specific example had belonged to Miss Gray. Another was commissioned by the eminent connoisseur and patron of Modernism, the Maharaja of Indore.

The Gourdon Collection of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and modernist design is being sold by Christie’s International at the Palais de Tokyo on March 29-31, 2011. The 500 works are owned by French collector Laurent Negro, who has been buying 20th-century design since the 1990s. Her 1920s black lacquer “Brick” screen sold at auction last night. The black lacquered screen panel, part of the late Co Wexford designer's personal furniture at her Paris apartment, was one of the first pieces to go under the hammer last night and sold for €1.3m at Christie's in Paris. The 1923-1925 'Brick' screen was among 15 Gray pieces that are expected to fetch up to €6m by the end of the auction tomorrow. An Bibendum Armchair - with a tubular chrome base and puffy seats - that is seen as a classic example of her radical foray into modernism - sold for €709,000, while a circa 1926-1929 standing table fetched €241,000.



Her works were included in the prestigious Gourdon Collection which went under the hammer at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris yesterday. The collection is regarded as one of the most important private collections of early 20th Century modern art. Eileen Gray was born in Brownswood, near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford in 1879, and died in Paris aged 99. The furniture from her Paris apartment now forms the centrepiece of the Eileen Gray exhibition at the National Museum, Collins Barracks in Dublin. It is good that this most famous Irish designer’s great talent is recognised in her own country and in the extraordinary prices her works achieve in the salerooms.


Maison en bord de mer E.1027 - Roquebrune Cap Martin

For more on E-1027, the iconic Moderne house designed by Eileen Gray at Roquebrune Cap Martin see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

For the story of Eileen Gray’s armchair, Fauteuil aux Serpents, which achieved the highest price ever for a piece of 20th Century furniture see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/02/eileen-grays-armchair.html



FAUTEUIL 'BIBENDUM', c. 1926-1929

High and Over, Amersham

“In 1931 all Buckinghamshire was scandalised by the
appearance, high above Amersham, of a concrete house in the
shape of a letter “Y”.

It was built for a young professor, by a young architect, Amyas
Connell . “I am the home of a 20th Century family”, it proclaimed,
“that loves air and sun and open country”
It started a style called moderne”

Sir John Betjeman – Metroland


Entrance Hallway



In his usual wonderful epigrammatic style (in the video at the bottom of this article) the former British Poet Laureate sums up why High and Over is so important, the first and still the greatest English house in the Modern Style pioneered by Le Corbusier, an incredibly confident first commission for its 28 year old New Zealand born architect, Aymas Connell. I had not been down to see the house which is 12 miles from where I live in some years because, frankly, the vandalism of the setting by English planning philistines depresses me. When it was built the client, Bernard Ashmole, had acquired 12 acres from the Drake Estate of a bare hillside on the Station Road between the Metropolitan Railway’s Amersham Station at Amersham-on-the-Hill and the Old Amersham commanding views over the storied old town and the lovely Misbourne Valley. Soon 5 speculative “Sun Houses”, also designed by Aymas Connell, were built on the unpaved approach drive guiding visitors like pilotis to a servants lodge with a massive iron gate leading into the ten acre estate surrounding the house. This area contained a water tower, a fives court and 7 fish ponds connected by cascades.


View from High and Over today showing the circular swimming pool.





During WW11 the entrance gate went and when Bernard Ashmole sold the estate in the early 1960’s it all went wrong. The context was destroyed by no less than 50 houses built in a crescent where the fishponds cascaded and High and Over was divided into two houses to successfully save it from demolition. This was the Britain of 80% tax rates and exchange controls and large houses were not in fashion. In front in the ironically named “First Avenue” more box live semi Ds were built to destroy the view which was the raison d’etre for the house being High and Over.


Entrance Front

High & Over is widely considered to be the first and finest house to be built in the Modern style in Britain. Designed in 1929 by Amyas Connell (who later became part of the pioneering architectural practice Connell, Ward & Lucas), and I visited to renew my acquaintance with it as the Grade II* listed house is being offered for sale in its entirety for the first time since it was divided into two properties in 1962.

Modernism was an attempt by utopian architects to redefine the world after the horrors of WW1, by putting usefulness and social equality first. They used new industrial materials and craft techniques to create stark, functional spaces. Pioneers of the movement from the Bauhaus School in Germany included Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Art deco added a lightness of touch by including echoes of the ocean liner, motor car and aeroplane, and sometimes a dash of the exotic. Think glamour and cocktails.


The main stairwell

"The last great British country house and the first modern house in the English countryside." The House Book, Phaidon, 2001




Today at the entrance to High & Over the original chrome double front doors open into a large, circular, black marble floored hall with a circular balcony overlooking from the first floor. Leading off the entrance hall in one wing is a large triple aspect sitting room with French doors opening out onto a ground floor terrace. A striking dining room, decorated with gold metallic leaf, is in the second wing and in the third wing the kitchen and family room, again with French doors leading out onto one of the ground level terraces.


Dining Room decorated with gold leaf


Living Room

A stunning glass encased spiral staircase leads to the first and second floors where the original aluminium studded door frames and skirting, restored to their former glory, lead to the principal bedrooms. On the top floor a second sitting room leads out onto two spectacular, partially covered roof terraces – these inspired the locals to refer to High & Over as “The Aeroplane House” when it was first constructed – the terraces offer commanding views across to Amersham Old Town and over the Misbourne Valley. Today, High & Over is now set in landscaped grounds of 1.7 acres, principally laid to lawn and bordered with mature trees. To the south-facing rear of the property, steps lead down to the original circular swimming pool. To the east side is a pergola ornate with fragrant jasmine in the summer. To the west side a Garden Playhouse.




Roof Terrace

High & Over has been described by English Heritage, who first listed the house in 1971, as “of outstanding importance as the first truly convincing essay in the international style in England”, further pointing out the fact that is was “one of only two buildings included in the exhibition The International Style held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the curatorship of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932”. Alan Powers, the architectural historian has also described the house as “the first major house to be built in the style of the European Modern Movement” (‘The Twentieth Century House in Britain’, p.45).




The client - Sir Bernard Ashmole

This stunning house was something of a sensation at the time it was completed in 1931 and it continues to be a widely celebrated example of Modern architecture to this day. Rather surprisingly the house was commissioned by a professor who specialised in archaeology and ancient history, Bernard Ashmole (who later went on to become director of the British Museum). Despite Ashmole’s academic interest in the past, however, the house designed for him by Amyas Connell (1901-1980) looked firmly towards the future. Ashmole met Connell, a New Zealand-born architect, at the British School in Rome, where Ashmole was lecturing. Connell is well known to have been an admirer of the radical ideas of Le Corbusier, and High & Over (Connell’s first house design) shows a great debt to the Swiss architect whilst still offering a more English appearance of eccentricity. It was a fortuitous meeting for when Ashmole and his wife Dorothy returned to London they wanted to build a country house where he could commute to London and the site below Amersham Underground Station allowed that. I suspect the Ashmole’s came into an inheritance for this was a very expensive undertaking on a young professor’s salary. As for the Modern style being a reaction to the horrors of war Bernard Ashmole was both a survivor of the Battle of the Somme and a very brave man, as you must be to be awarded the Military Cross. Indeed he served in the RAF in World War Two and was honoured for bravery by the Greek Government.



Bernard Ashmole, CBE, MC (1894, Ilford, Essex – 1988, Peebles, Scotland) was a British archaeologist and art historian (M.A., B. Litt., Oxford 1924), who specialized in ancient Greek sculpture. He was Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of London, 1929-1948. He was a collateral descendant of Elias Ashmole (1617–92), eponymous benefactor of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where he was briefly assistant keeper of coins.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/11/oxfords-ashmolean-museum.html

Amyas Douglas Connell (23 June 1901 - 19 April 1980) was a highly influential British architect of the mid-twentieth century. He achieved early and conspicuous success as a student, winning the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1926. Having been impressed by the work of Le Corbusier at the 1925 Paris Exhibition and that of fellow French Modernists Andre Lurçat and Rob Mallet-Stevens, Connell effectively launched the Modernist architectural style in Great Britain.



The house is situated on a prominent hillside with spectacular views over the old town of Amersham and the Misbourne Valley on land that was originally part of the estate of the Tyrwhitt-Drake Family who lived at the nearby Shardeloes. The house was part of a larger scheme that included a gardener's lodge, water tower and generator house set in a garden that combined Cubist elements with the English landscape tradition. It was later joined by a group of speculative houses in similar style - the "Sun Houses."


Section showing the construction in concrete



A contemporary article

The house has a splayed Y-shaped plan with three wings radiating from a central hexagonal hall. This arrangement gives High & Over a very distinctive shape (so distinctive, in fact, that it is said that German pilots used it as a marker for their flight routes during the Second World War). The construction of the house is reinforced-concrete frame, in-filled with cavity wall construction externally of brick and with concrete block internally. All windows are metal, many in steel plated soffits. The site, on a hill in the Misbourne Valley, afforded the house plenty of light, air and views of the Chilterns. High & Over is built in the shape of a "Y". Whether it is an urban myth or not I'm not sure, but I have been told that High and Over during World War II had to be camouflaged as the distinctive shape of the house gave directions to German bombers on their routes to their targets in Britain.


The Sun Houses

The original house was joined shortly after by similar "Sun Houses". When the houses were built they were in the open with fine views over the Missbourne valley. Since then trees and vegetation have grown around the houses. High and Over has appeared on several TV programmes, and was the centre stage of an LWT produced Poirot.

Sun House One





This is first on your right as you go up Highover Park and is well looked after with its original frontage and roof terrace but it has been extended (in the same style) at the rear. It has a “Mackintosh” style sign saying “First Sun House.”

Sun House Two



This is No. 6 Highover Park and is original condition except for the room added over the garage which has an unfortunate splayed support detracting from the purity of the façade. It does have the original style blue/ green patination on the Crittal windows.

Sun House Three



This is the only one in entirely original condition but unfortunately two large trees in front obscure the elevation. It is rented out by the owner so the interior is pretty scruffy.

Sun House Four



Fourth House on the right which has had several extensions and replacement glazing which is near enough but not quiet right. Exterior is not well maintained.

Sun House Five


This is the only one on the left in the splay created by Highover Park and the public footpath. It is currently undergoing a full restoration by a new owner who is also adding on a low one storey pavillion in the same style.

The Lodge



This was the original Gardner’s Lodge which housed the couple who were the Housekeeper / Cook and Driver / Gardner which is why there were no servant’s accommodations in the main house. Today its appearance is execrable with totally inappropriate uPVC glazing ruining the elevations.

The significance of High & Over in the history of British houses was recognised early on as Country Life magazine devoted a large feature to it in 1931. “Here is architecture pure and unalloyed by sentiment, reminiscence or claptrap” wrote Christopher Hussey, the then editor, who also remarked that the building had unfairly “come in for a good deal of hostile comment”.

Hugh Pearman, the renowned architecture critic, visited High & Over in 2005 and noted in The Sunday Times that “despite the fact that some outbuildings, including a water tower and a fives court, have gone, it is still amazing... Here is a house built by two people [Ashmole and Connell] with immense talent and energy”.

The house has also featured in numerous other publications, a selection of which are listed below:

"One of the first houses in the country to accept the style of Le Corbusier". Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

"[High & Over] looks both seminal and fashionable. Connell not only introduced England to the Corbusian vocabulary of flat, white walls, horizontal windows, roof terraces and glazed staircases, but understood it... The house... exudes health and vitality - like Corbusier's Maison Cook or Maison Guggenbuhl transplanted to Bucks." Peter Wylde, The Twentieth Century Society Journal

"[High & Over] quickly compels interest greater than that elicited for any traditional building, and ultimately pleases by the sheer beauty and simplicity of the synthesis of purpose with construction. Here is architecture pure and unalloyed with sentiment, reminiscence or clap-trap. One goes away with a fresh and fertile mind." Christoper Hussey, Country Life (1931)

"High & Over is regarded as Britain's first Modernist and in important example of the International in the UK" 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.

In this early and impressive design, Connell utilises his deep understanding of Roman architecture in a complex reworking of Corbusean modernism, attempting a fusion that would connect the classical and modern worlds. While some British critics interpreted this as muddled formalism, it was a beacon to a younger generation of architects including Alison and Peter Smithson. In 1962, it was divided into two separate dwellings in a (successful) effort to save it from demolition.

THE HOUSE OF A DREAM

Click on picture to play the British Pathe video

In 1931 British Pathe produced a short film about High and Over in its recently completed state, entitled "The house of a dream". The film is introduced with "For centuries houses have been built to meet the needs of each age. Today, we dream of houses open to sun and air, embodying everything that modern science can offer." and it features excellent shots of the interior and exterior.


The 1960s housing enveloping High and Over

In the 1960s a large part of the grounds of the house were sold off to developers and the drive was re-used to make an adopted road, Highover Park, serving approximately 50 1960s detached, semi-detached and town houses. This development had no connection to Connell but the houses do share certain allusions to the modernist style, however they have not worn well and today you see cluttered driveways, wheelie bins and weed ridden patches of gardens. They effectively bore into the back of High and Over ruining its privacy and its setting. This development and other in-fill developments around High and Over during the last 40 years have had an impact on the house's immediate environment and aspects, and new developments still generate considerable public attention and protest about their impact on High and Over. In a recent development the route of HS2 – the High Speed Rail Line to Birmingham is due to be built in a tunnel under First Avenue in front of the house.

But the biggest loss has been the garden. There used to be 10 acres of it, complete with a concrete water tower, squash courts and the fish ponds giving the house seclusion with internal and external vistas. Now, the 1960s housing is there instead. A row of concrete posts fanned out from the house, but were chopped down to make way for the garage. So the garden is much reduced with the circular swimming pool in front of the house and the garden pergola. I think High & Over was lived in nicely until the Second World War but afterwards in austerity and high tax Britain of the 1950's became less of a joy.




Front Door

It is not just the gardens which have been altered but also the interior. If restored, the ground floor could be one of the most staggering interiors in England. The chromium-plated front door used to open onto a hexagonal hall. It was a glamorous space to sail through, with a fountain in the middle that reached up to the ceiling. The three main rooms that opened off the hall had doors that could be folded back to turn the ground floor into one large space. When it was subdivided the wing with the service stairs became a separate house so that today there are too many bedrooms (8) and what was the splendid library reaching into the garden has now been subdivided with a modern kitchen. The gilded Art Deco Dining Room which had double doors (as did the Living Room and Library) opening into the Hallway to give a grand entertaining space is now entered from a side corridor.



There is now a unique opportunity for a rich benefactor to acquire and restore this one of a kind property to its original state, the first and greatest Modern house in Britain.

Savills (www.savills.com) and The Modern House (www.themodernhouse.net ) have it on sale with a guide price of £2,350 k which may seem a lot but for say 3 million restored you would get a modern work of art (and public approval) for less than the cost of an OK painting. Any takers – If you are interested there is an “Open House” on 15th May 2010.




For more on Architecture and Design see ArchiBlogs in the Blog sidebar.

E-1027 Roquebrune Cap Martin

One of the most intriguing Irish designers was Eileen Gray (1878 – 1976), an Irish aristocrat who inhabited a bohemian world and who was neglected for much of her career but whose work and achievements has been greatly appreciated with hindsight, particularly in Ireland where she was largely unknown in her lifetime as she mainly lived and worked in France. Eileen Gray is regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco. 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. 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 Perriands 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. From her early laquer work to design classics like the Bibendum chair and her architectural masterpiece, E-1027, Eileen Gray's work was as individual as it was exciting. The Dutch magazine, Wendingen, declared in 1924: "Eileen Gray occupies the centre of the modern movement. In all her tendencies, visions and expressions she is modern."




E-1027


E-1027 Frontage

Le Corbusier, arguably the greatest architect of the 20th century, was obsessed and haunted by E-1027, the seaside villa Eileen Gray built at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929. Over the decades, he sought to possess her "maison en bord de mer" in a multitude of ways. It may have been the last thing he saw before dying of a heart attack while swimming off the rocks beneath E-1027 in 1965. After he died, the footpath serving the area was designated Promenade Le Corbusier. In time, as Gray's reputation faded, some would even credit him with the design of her villa.

In 1907 Gray - the only Irish person wholly immersed in the pioneering work of the modern movement - moved to Paris, taking an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte, which she maintained until her death on October 31, 1976, at the age of 98. The furniture from her Paris apartment now forms the centrepiece of the Eileen Gray exhibition at the National Museum, Collins Barracks in Dublin.


Rue de Lota apartment designed by Eileen Gray with her Pirogue sofa

Eileen Gray was born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith in Brownswood near Enniscorthy, County Wexford on August 9, 1878. The family changed their name to Gray in 1893, after her mother, Lady Eveleen Pounden, inherited a peerage from an uncle in Scotland and claimed her title, Baroness Gray. Interested in art and wishing to live beyond the boundaries of conventional expectations, Eileen left home for Paris in 1902. She had already attended art school in England, and in Paris she continued her education, developing her talents as a painter and ultimately as a great designer. Gray was first to become know for the lacquer technique she developed, a technique that combined the Asian lacquer tradition and its motifs with a contemporary modernist aesthetic. By 1912-1913 she was already becoming a name, and her luxurious screens, tables, and door panels sold well and were exhibited. Throughout this time she was also designing striking rugs decorated with geometric shapes and patterns. Like her early lacquer work, these rugs, and later her famous chairs - particularly the Transat chair, the non-conformist chair, the Lota sofa, and the Bibendum - secured Eileen Gray's place as one of the most influential designers of the 20th century.


Bibendum chair on the left of the living room


Nonconformist chair, designed for E-1027

In 1922 Gray opened her own shop, Jean Désert, where she exhibited her furniture and designs as well as those of her contemporaries. At around the same time she met Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect and editor of the influential journal "l'Architecture Vivante," with whom she formed a very close personal and professional relationship. Her friendship with Badovici was to dramatically affect the course her artistic practice was to take, for it was he who suggested to Gray that she try her hand at architecture, and it was for him that she built her first house and one of her most enduring achievements, the Villa E-1027. Later in her life she explained: "Badovici said to me: why don't you build? I laughed in his face. I had always loved architecture - more than anything - but I didn't think myself capable of it."

E-1027, First Floor Plan


Rug for E-1027

In 1925, the pair began to explore the area around Saint-Tropez, seeking an appropriate site on which to build a summer refuge for Badovici. She subsequently discovered an isolated plot - inaccessible by car, but within walking distance of both a railway station and a sandy beach - along a rocky stretch of coastline. Gray bought the site and spent three years in Roquebrune, taking prime responsibility for both design and construction, while Badovici visited frequently to assist in technical matters. The name of the villa, E-1027, is a cipher for the architects' intertwined initials: following the E, the numbers 10, 2 and 7 represent the alphabetical order of the letters J, B and G, respectively. Built between 1926 and 1929, E-1027 was a unique experiment in architecture and design. Eileen Gray combined built-in furniture with ingenious spatial planning to engage the user with the building and site, incorporating the sun and the sea into the very experience of the house.


Maison en bord de mer E.1027 - Roquebrune Cap Martin

Gray declared: "This house has been built for a person who likes work, sports and receiving friends." E-1027 looks much bigger than it is. It has two bedrooms, a maid's room, utility rooms and a large space, partitioned with screen furniture that could serve as a living room, dining area and cloakroom or guest room. The main living area overlooks Monte Carlo harbour and the bedrooms face the rising sun. Service spaces are isolated: the kitchen, adjoining an outdoor cooking space, is separate from the rest of the house. Gray felt that each room should remain independent of the others, arguing that "everyone, even in a house of restricted dimensions, must be able to remain free and independent. They must have the impression of being alone, and if desired, entirely alone." Each room has a balcony and access to the garden.


Fauteuil aux Serpents

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/02/eileen-grays-armchair.html

In the most intricately detailed portions of the house - the bathroom, stairway, and the passage linking the dining alcove and bedroom - Gray filled every surplus cubic metre with concealed storage compartments, each designed to accommodate a specific item. The villa provided what she called the "minimum of space, maximum of comfort."


Bedroom


Bedroom dressing table

Her Transat "deck chair" (inspired by transatlantic liners), tubular steel bedside table and Bibendum (Latin for "now is the time to drink" but named for its resemblence to the "Michelin Man", a motoring icon with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other!) armchair - all designed for E-1027 - have become timeless items of furniture that are still manufactured. She produced a second furniture type for the house, which she termed "le style camping." These items are flexible, light and portable, capable of assuming different configurations to accommodate a range of activities. Cabin-like furniture, conceived as a series of extrusions from the wall that break down the boundaries between architecture and furnishings, contained pillows, mosquito netting, books, a reading light and tea things.

Gray admired Le Corbusier's architecture, even if she remained unconvinced by his polemical assertions. Responding to his well-known maxim, she concluded: "A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his emanation." She used Corbusian stencils to inscribe admonitions on the walls of E-1027 - "entrez lentement" (enter slowly) by the main entrance and "defence de rire" (no laughing) on the foyer partition.


Eileen Gray Side table


Eileen Gray Satellite Mirror

A friend of Badovici's, Le Corbusier visited E-1027 on numerous occasions and admired it very much, so much so that he was moved to add his own touch to the clean white villa, painting a series of murals on its walls between 1937-39. This intrusion onto her design infuriated Gray, who considered the murals outright vandalism. Whether he painted these murals out of admiration for her work or jealousy of her accomplishment, Le Corbusier became intricately tied with the future of the house. Failing to purchase it himself, he eventually bought a piece of properly just east of E-1027, where he built a small, rustic cabin, "Le Cabanon." Here he would go for work and quiet contemplation, taking daily swims on the beach outside the house. After he died in those very waters, the whole area was declared a "Site Moderne," or "Modern Site," and deemed an area of cultural and historical importance and international interest. Today E-1027 is recognized as the founding element of this site.


Le Corbusier mural at main entrance,1938-39

Jean Badovici lived in the house until his death in 1956. In 1960, fearful for the future of E-1027 and his murals, Corbusier persuaded Madame Marie-Louise Schelbert of Zurich to buy the villa. He took an active interest in preserving both the house and its contents, retaining Gray's furnishings and restoring some of his paintings in 1961. When Schelbert died in 1982, the villa was left to her doctor, Peter Kägi, who removed Gray's furniture to Switzerland and eventually sold it through Sotheby's in Monaco on October 13, 1991, for the equivalent of €390,000. The Pompidou Centre pre-empted the sale of several lots - a common practice in France when a state body wishes to buy a particular item at auction. Most of the 29 lots went to France and Germany. Kägi died a few years later, unfortunately before any of the restorations began. After his death the house remained empty and susceptible to vandals and squatters who incurred serious damage onto the already ailing edifice, leaving it in dangerously precarious shape.


Eileen Gray in her rue de Bonaparte apartment with a Block Screen, 1970

Today, after years of neglect and vandalism, the house is in a serious state of disrepair. Friends of E-1027 is cooperating closely with the French government and the township of Roquebrune-Cap Martin, who have recently purchased the villa in partnership with the Coastal Conservancy, on both the exterior and interior restoration of this important work of modern architecture. The first phase of the renovation is already underway, supported in part by funds raised by Friends of E-1027. Once the house is fully restored and refurbished with copies of its original furniture and decorations, it will be maintained as a museum with a study and exhibition center for contemporary design near the site.


E-1027 in 2001

There is another Irish connection with Roquebrune as the poet William Butler Yeats was buried there just after the outbreak f the Second World War. W.B. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Co. Dublin in 1865 and educated in London but he spent his childhood holidays in Sligo and developed a deep affinity for the area.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-female-member-of-parliament.html

Yeats died in Menton, France in 1939 and was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin after a private funeral but according to his wishes his body was moved after the war in 1948 to Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. In his poem "Under Ben Bulben" Yeats outlined how and where he was to be buried and even included the epitaph he wanted inscribed on his gravestone:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.



Today Roquebrune Cap Martin is not just the retreat of the idle rich and their servants but is easily accessible by road and rail from Nice Airport where there are frequent budget flights by the likes of easyJet who we travelled with. By road head along the A8 from Nice (16km.) take exit Menton La Turbie. If you are coming from Menton take exit Monaco Roquebrune. By the cliff roads take Grande Corniche (D2564), Moyenne Corniche (RN7), Basse Corniche (RN98). But the easiest way is on SNCF from Nice on the costal railway which passes by Bono’s back garden as it goes through Eze-bord-de-Mer!




Roquebrune

Situated 2 kilometres from Menton and Monte Carlo, this seaside resort rises to 300m. altitude starting at the water's edge and going all the way up to its perched village. The luxury of the villas, some of which resemble palaces remind us that here, in Roquebrune, statesmen, royalty, writers, and artists all came looking for inspiration and rest: Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Sacha Guitry, Jacques Brel, Silvana Mangano et al. Today the atmosphere is more Eurotrash with Russian Oligarski and good time girls from Kiev and Wolverhampton on the make or as Somerset Maugham tellingly remarked about neighbouring Monte Carlo “A sunny place for shady people” !













Villa Torre Clementina

Cap-Martin, within the commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, is a beautiful wooded peninsula on the Mediterranean, just below the perched Roquebrune village. The train station is down here, along with the beach, some campsites and shops. The peninsula itself is largely covered with very expensive walled estates, some dating back to the 19th century and the Belle Epoque. To inhale the athmoshere of that era head along the Avenue l'Imperatrice Eugenie or on the costal footpath to Monaco down below. The Sentier Littoral offers an invigorating two hour walk around the length of Cap Martin all the way to Menton. En route you will catch just the barest glimpse of the superb villas whose estates cover the main area of the Cap. Somewhere above is the ravishing Villa Torre Clementina restored by Frederick R. Koch, an American collector and philanthropist. Designed in 1904 by the architect Lucien Hesse for the writer Ernesta Stern (who is buried in Menton churchyard) this neo-Romanesque confection and superb gardens with pavilions and a pergola are on the French register of historic monuments.

See; Villa Torre Clementina

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/12/villa-torre-clementina-roquebrune-cap.html

Further along the path you come to the viewing gallery built onto the rocks at the end overlooking Monaco for the magnificent Villa Cyranos, the Residence de l'Imperatrice Eugenie.


Villa Cyranos


Imperatrice Eugenie

The Empress was the ravishing young aristocratic Spanish wife of the Emperor Louis Napoleon and she was Empress of France from 1853 – 1870 when Louis Napoleon was deposed and took refuge in England as a result of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. He died there in 1873. His son, also Louis, is commemorated by the pub “The Prince Imperial” in Chislehurst in Kent where they lived in exile, their mansion in exile is now the rather spendid clubhouse of the local golf club. He was a cavalry officer in the British Army and was rumored to have been friendly with Princess Beatrice, youngest daughter of Queen Victoria, and there was much speculation of a marriage between them. That did not have a chance to occur as the Prince Imperial was killed when fighting for the British in South Africa in the Zulu Wars on June 1, 1879. Beatrice sent a beautiful wreath for his grave at Farnborough, which fueled the speculation that she had been hoping for a match. She went on to marry Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885 who coincidentally also died in Africa. Ten years into their marriage, on 20 January 1896, Prince Henry died of malaria while fighting in the Anglo-Ashanti War in what was the Gold Coast, now modern Ghana. Her daughter married the King of Spain and is Juan Carlos's grandmother. The Empress Eugenie returned in time to France where she lived in some magnificence to the ripe old age of 95, a testament to the clement marine climate of Roquebrune Cap Martin. She is buried beside the Emperor and the Prince Imperial in a specially constructed crypt at the Monastery of St. Michael in Farnborough, England.


Roquebrune village



Today Roquebrune Cap Martin is still a beautiful place which reposes gracefully on the Riviera and in W.B. Yeats and Eileen Gray’s remarkable E-1027 it has two significant Irish connections.

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