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Eileen Gray's E. 1027
It was midsummer when I visited and a gardener was weeding among freshly planted lemon trees. Approached from the land, E.1027 is as modest as a brick of Lego, its narrow slit of windows giving little away. And yet, before you even reach the front door, it extends towards you, part of Gray’s deliberate strategy of disrupting the fixed boundary between inside and out. A summer kitchen, a shower and terraces hug the exterior, designed for cooking, washing and loitering en plein air.
To step from the womb-like entrance chamber into the living space is to be dunked in light. Gray thought entering a house should induce ‘the sensation of pleasure when one arrives with a boat in a harbour; the feeling of being enclosed but free to circulate’. Part of the charm of nautical travel is the ingenious, doll’s-house-like use of space and there’s something almost Heath Robinsonish about E.1027’s witty, ship-shape innovations: the mirrored tea tray with a cork surface, to avoid being disturbed by the chink of china on metal; the spiral staircase with insets cut into each step to slot your foot into; the tables that rise, lower, expand and contract; the bathroom mirrors angled precisely so that Badovici could assess his bald spot.
In 1929, the year that E.1027 was completed, Coco Chanel also commissioned a house in the village: La Pausa, named for the rest that Mary Magdalene supposedly took there. The difference between the two is salutary. Chanel, who grew up in poverty, craved luxury, and her house was built and furnished on a lavish scale. For Gray, however, raised in a stately home, luxury was not derived from endless rooms or opulent furnishings, but rather from privacy, discretion, refinement and exactitude. The house, as she imagined it, was a space that could be shared by people who need never be aware of each other’s presence, its contents stripped back to rigorously perfected essentials.
Even now, battered, worn and furnished with replica Bibendum chairs and daybeds, it’s a house explicitly designed for pleasure. Take the bathtub, floating beneath a lightwell and surrounded by exquisitely glazed black tiles; having a bath there must have felt like splashing in moonlight. Most rooms possess dual entrances and screens, testifying to a vision of love as a relationship between independent creatures, who require absolutely separate as well as conjoined space. ‘Even in the smallest house,’ she wrote, ‘each person must feel alone, completely alone.’
