E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea: an elegant docufiction journey through a real-life modernist melodrama

When the Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray created her first building, a modernist villa in the Côte d’Azur, she coded a romantic gesture into its name: E.1027. It’s significant that she began by asserting her own name, E for Eileen, as the rest is a fusion of two lovers: numbers for her initials, and for that of her partner, the French architecture critic Jean Badovici. She designed the place with herself and Badovici in mind, but a strange modernist melodrama would leave her legacy interlocked with another man against her will. 

The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier admired E.1027, but that admiration mutated into professional envy, and like an over-sugared child seeking parental attention, he painted 11 loud frescoes across her intentionally white walls without her knowledge. This infuriating story has followed Gray’s name around for 85 years and features heavily in E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, a docufiction film from Swiss co-directors Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub. But this elegant and slippery work avoids the missteps of the Gray biopic The Price of Desire (2016), which put too much dramatic focus on Le Corbusier. There he was a fourth-wall breaking villain who, like the real man, turned himself into the main character. 

Gray rejected Le Corbusier’s idea of a house as a ‘machine for living’, believing architecture should be in harmony with “its main object – the living human being”. She breathed this intellectual emotionalism into E.1027: she painted signs on the wall that read ‘no laughter’ and ‘enter slowly’, and furnished it with an adjustable table designed for breakfast in bed. E.1027 shares some of Gray’s playfulness in its criss-crossing of archive footage and fiction. As though attending a video installation of her own work, the fictional Gray walks between screens on which photos of her life and designs are projected, intercut with era-evoking clips from Man Ray’s surrealist cinépoème Emak Bakia (1926) and Hans Richter’s Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928). She is played with intoxicating 1920s androgyny by the Irish actor Natalie Radmall-Quirke.

Gray’s scattered narration zips all too quickly through some of the most interesting parts of her life – 20s avant-garde Paris, a romance with French singer Marie-Louise Damien. Still, this frenetic tango with Gray’s memories is more exciting than any talking-head biographical trudge. There’s a touch of temporal whiplash, particularly when Badovici (the fantastically named Axel Moustache), arrives on the sparse soundstage. They bond over modernist theorising, and hop on two chairs that represent Gray’s car. Toot toot! They’re off on a passionate architectural journey that will eventually lead to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the site for E.1027. 

Minger and Schaub had permission to shoot at the real, restored E.1027, which stands like a yacht on stilts above the sea: director of photography Ramon Giger luxuriates in every angle of Gray’s masterpiece. It was meant as a shared space of creation, but bon vivant Badovici was less concerned with work. Swift shots of Gray clearing away glasses of stale wine tell us modernist thinking didn’t extend to the division of domestic labour. (The film has its own blind spot, showing Gray having a seemingly egalitarian relationship with her maid Louise. In fact, Gray, daughter of a baroness, designed E.1027’s servants’ quarters to be small and out of sight.) 

Gray leaves Badovici along with the house, and Le Corbusier (Charles Morillon) swoops in to peck at the former love nest. She only learned about the murals he painted at E.1027 – while naked, to add insult to injury – when she saw pictures of them printed in a magazine, The article made no mention of her name, starting a decades-long trend of Corbusier being credited as the architect of E.1027. If the film version of Gray calling his actions “Violence, vandalism, un viol [rape]” feels extreme, here’s the real Corbusier’s words on the act: “The mural is not to enhance the wall, but on the contrary, a means to violently destroy [it].” 

E.1027 saw many more scandals – Badovici died and the house was in his name, so it passed through owners, years of parties, orgies, bullets from bored Nazis, a violent murder. Until her ‘rediscovery’ in the late 1960s, Gray’s own story was talked about in the same way as the house: ‘neglected’, a vague term that swerves blame and, like the ‘machine for living’, forgets the human within. That’s something this film, in its respectful evocation of Gray’s vision, can’t be accused of. 

Gray destroyed most of her personal papers, but kept a fastidious portfolio of her designs. E.1027 shows an archive interview in which Gray at 96 is asked about her work, “Does it amuse you, Eileen, that 50 years later, that work you were doing is high fashion again?” You can feel her scepticism. It all came too late.

► E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea is in UK cinemas 16 May.