The story behind the Eileen Gray table
Eileen Gray was born in 1878 in County Wexford in Ireland. Coming from an Irish-Scottish aristocratic family, she first went to London in the UK to study architecture and design, enrolling at the Slade School of Art around the turn of the century. She then moved to Paris in France, where she soon found her way into the art scene.
Gray first became known as a leading designer of lacquered screens and decorative panels. Later, she moved away from the rather elitist design of late Art Nouveau towards less opulent designs. The Irish artist was one of the pioneers who, in the 1920s and 1930s, created what we now call modern design.
Eileen Gray's tubular steel furniture, revolutionary at the time, is now considered classic. As the crowning achievement of her career, she was appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1972, and in 1978 the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the USA added her legendary Adjustable Table to its permanent design collection.
As one of the few women in the pantheon of 20th-century design pioneers, she is mentioned in the same breath as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. Her theories of design and architecture shaped our ideas about living, and decades after her death she is still regarded as the epitome of modernism.
In the second phase of her career, Eileen Gray turned to architecture, where she also created masterpieces. She took a stance against Le Corbusier's concept of the "machine for living in". "A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man" – this is how Gray summed up her own understanding of architecture.
Eileen Gray died in 1976 at the age of 98.
