Eileen Gray (1878-1976)

When I came to write my novel Time & Destiny, a fictionalised account of the life of Irish designer Eileen Gray, I felt I knew her. After all I had researched and written a long feature for Image magazine which was followed by a radio play for RTE, titled ‘Time & Straw’. I was wrong, I didn’t know her, still don’t, and that is part of her mystique.

The facts of her life are well documented. From the beginning it was the hidden, less publicised aspects that I found most intriguing. Because she had destroyed private papers, letters and photographs but left detailed accounts of each of her projects, I knew I had to be true to her work but I felt a strange entitlement to give her a happier personal life than she had experienced.

Throughout the pages of Time & Destiny she is unconditionally loved and desired by people I deemed worthy of her. Her best friend is French writer Colette whose novel Chéri I devoured as a teenager under the eiderdown by the light of a torch. Somebody like Eileen deserved a devoted admirer; who better than Jacques Doucet, arts patron and the purchaser of Le Destin, the lacquer screen that made Eileen’s name and decades later was bought by Yves St Laurent.

I loved the competent way she nurtured her talent, engaging Sugawara, the Japanese lacquerist to teach her the finer points of lacquering; refusing to follow the opulent trends of the time; and her working relationship with Jacques Doucet. I was amazed at her discreet but disastrous relationships with both men and women: her love affair with nightclub singer Damia and the destruction of her liaison with Romanian architect Jean Badovici. I was as saddened as Eileen at the re-furbishing of her family home and understood her refusal to return; outraged at the state of E.1027, the love nest she created for Jean Badovici; despaired on discovering her grave no longer exists in Pere LeChaise Cemetery in Paris as her family omitted to pay the fee.

I was fascinated by her elegant lifestyle in Paris and refusal to use her title; her wardrobe of designer clothes, handmade silk underwear, perfectly manicured nails and sharply bobbed hair. I admired her courage and ability to take on new ventures – driving an ambulance during the World War I; learning to fly; travelling the world. Despite her reclusiveness and failing eyesight, her selected interest in the world around her never diminished. When Bruce Chatwin interviewed her for the Sunday Times, he noticed a map of Patagonia and remarked it was a place he’d like to visit, she suggested he go for her, and when he did, the result in 1977 was In Patagonia, his first novel.

For more about Eileen Gray’s home on the Côte d’Azur, E.1027, click here