Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea: Among other creative outlets, Gray also had a passion for designing buildings, often in collaboration with Jean Badovici, a journalism architect who happened to be one of her lovers for a few years. The name E.1027, which was the house, served a purpose. It was a way of hiding the fact that they were interested in each other, where their initials were commercially fused. E was Eileen and 10 was J which is the 10th letter in the alphabet, 2 was B and 7 was Gray.

I was relieved to come to Wallis Island and did not have to plan how because I left my heart in the wall plane where I had been a long time. How did she say that; a spiritual extension maybe? No, it was rather a “relief” where one could rest should the ardors of the world become too much – just herself, Jean and the ocean.

But then the “wind changed.” The Rivieras gradually ceased to be the enchanting little corners in undisturbed nature, and became the only place where the smart set went, and also the excessive pleasure-loving artists.

E.1027’s milestone was another scarring stop on a tour of the sea which sank back in anger for Mrs Gray, sanctuary was always preferred to people. Her house was full of style and great decorum, where she said she could be ‘safe and free’ rather than a place where it was always cleaned after wild sleazy nite outs.

And so she left both it and him, ‘where I was not going back ever’ – although she had moved into another house in only 20 minutes’ drive: ‘It was again nowhere. The place I had been looking for didn’t exist. It was elsewhere’. When Le Corbusier visited E.1027 – He knew Badovici – He fell in love with the house at once. After her departure he wrote: “It allures and calls me…The house is more than architecture. Its beauty is hurting me.”

One more thing about Eileen – we learn from our two directors the tell us about later building models of her houses on Knocknacree Road (Casa Serena) one of them and another outside Menton (Tempe à Pailla) ‘All these geometries, she said, workers and people working, take me from inside. Vita’s models look kin: for us the house is an envelope that surrounds us delicately, protects us from the environment.’ For Le Corbusier? “the house is a machine to live in, the less you need me to tell you this.”

On those cool walls, he covered with exotic murals depicting how he wanted to be as an inner surrealist and with cloister murals, and gradually he started parenting the house including a construction of a hut 20 meters behind the hut among the hills he cultivated a garden in where most people assumed that was his composition he would not go against and destroy that image.

The two directors take us through the narrative until this time – the time when German soldiers held it, used it for target practice, the siege by the squatters, the murder in the kitchen, its spiraling into decay and then rehabilitation and reconfiguration to the contemporary arts center it is now.

E.1027 – Eileen Gray and The House by the Sea is aided in production by Swiss Philip Delaquis and Rise and Shine distributes it; It has a beautiful arthouse feeling with three actors in a story taking place partly in the actual house and partly in a Swiss film set; there was archival material well imagined as part of the action (some of which was projected on Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s face while she was in Eileen’s role) taking us to an artistic version of Paris in the 1920s, where we also meet the real Eileen Gray in the 70s, as she recalls this extraordinary, great era that became hard for her later on.

“Le Corbusier was a man incredible enough to be the prime hero in a film,” stresses the director Beatrice Minger to BDE. “Philip Delaquis, the producer, Sym Schaub as a co-director came to me as a ‘third party’ wanting to know if there is another story about this man that has not been told.” She was captivated by the story of how Eileen Gray constructed the E. 1027 house.

“It is not just any architectural building we want to focus on: the house has so many facets, hence we cannot shoot a feature on this house without focusing on this too,” she said. So I went on studying Eileen Gray, and the more I got familiarized with her, the deeper was my infatuation with the lady, as she is really such a wonderful person .”

Minger refers to one such expression within the Eileen Gray ‘scene’, one told to her by Jennifer Goff, curator of the National Irish Museum and a specialist on the woman. She warned me at first, “Beatrice, be careful because if you ever enter the gray zone, you will never come out of it.”

In her notes she states that very often both Gray and Le Corbusier must have been at the root of the unresolved drama – which was Le Corbusier’s shocking and indelicate treatment of the house…some people would say.

She does concede that Badovici may encouraged Le Corbusier to do some invasive decorating from the inside out, as if to incorporate these lovely murals.. Of course they did. Le Corbusier himself appeared to consider that he was adding value to the house, and so was painting himself over this masterpiece, albeit in part. But this view does not sit well Minger.

She confesses to BDE that there was an “anger and an uneasiness” towards this blatant infringement of Gray’s vision. “This I am very quick to state as wrong in all ways possible but justifying it is not that simple.”

It now functions as a museum and has been carefully renovated (the politically charged wall paintings still up). Besides, it was one of the most important venues for shooting – together with a Swiss film studio, where most scenarios of the film took place.

“You can’t stay there all day,” Minger comments on filming in the relatively small house. “You have to step outside so you can come back in and gaze at it again, but from another angle or from another viewpoint. First, it’s concerning the movement of the house from [Gray’s] gaze. And then we change the viewpoint to the man gaze if you will with Le Corbusier.” Similarly, time and money meant they could not have stayed inside the house and shoot there for that long.

Consequently, “The production had no option but to believe” that the other part of the story can be pursued simultaneously at the sound stage in Basel, where most of the words are performed. “During the whole course of the film Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea the making of it more and more became obvious to me how this space actually must look like and how it must feel….what it must perform at the end…” It’s such a wonderful surprise to venture into a headspace like this, when one understands almost nothing from the very start,” says Minger about their decision to shoot from two such extreme poles.

But in this space theater, “the actors were very good, I think they were extremely brilliant really,” stresses Minger, adding further that somehow “Natalie Radmall-Quirke just became Eileen Gray.”

And she remembers how at the end of shooting in E.1027 house, the two female guardians of the museum approached the director and Natalie with tears saying; “Eileen Gray is back”.

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