The new creation movement has observed many movers and shakers in its long life, but possibly only a little can compete the creations provided by the Irish designer Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray to the movement. Much akin to her previous contemporaries Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, Eileen Gray integrated the designs and uniqueness seen in new architecture into furniture design and creating to many chairs, tables and other furnishings that are both useful stuff and works of art.
Given birth on August 1878 in the little market city of Enniscorthy in southeast Ireland, Eileen Gray was the youngest of five children. His father, James Maclaren Gray, was a painter by profession and developed Gray’s passion for the arts by carrying her to painting tours around Italy and Switzerland. In 1898, when Eileen was twenty years old, she entred at the prominent Slade School of Fine Art of the University College London. However, soon after her father perished in 1900 Gray went on with her schooling at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi in Paris until 1905 where she went back to London to care for her ill mother. It was also during this moment that she trained and mastered the art of lacquerwork under the guidance of Seizo Sugawara, a lacquer restoration professional who worked at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Gray’s creation was first widely accepted in 1914 when she was summoned by Madame Levy, a rich milliner, to decorate the interiors of her place on Rue de Lota in Paris. The adornment work took Eileen Gray almost 5 years from 1917 to 1921, in which she designed and built the apartment’s chairs, rugs, lamps, and other furnishings. Her most prominent inputs in the Rue de Lota work were the insertion of lacquered panels for the walls and the Bibendum Chair, a modernist red leather chair with a distinctive back and arm rest finished of padded leather tubes. Gray’s task at the Rue de Lota granted her the respect and accolades from critics alike, and this serious success (plus the payment she received from Madame Levy) enabled her to make her own studio in Paris to display her work.
One of Eileen Gray’s distinguished products is the Eileen Gray Side Table (made by Gray in 1927) the Side Table is a polished steel table consisting of two shafts connected to a C-shaped based and a round glass top. The Side Table was section of the interior fixtures of the E-1027 which Gray made for herself and Jean Badovici at the coast of Roquebrune-Cap Martin, France. The table is now kept as part of Gray’s non-conformist works and is named a classic example of modern furniture design.