E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

Irish designer Eileen Gray built a refuge on the Côte d‘Azur in 1929. Her first house is an avant-garde masterpiece. She named it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it. Renowned architect Le Corbusier, upon discovering the house, became intrigued and obsessed. He later covered the walls with murals and published photos of them.

Gray described these paintings as vandalism and demanded restitution. He ignored her wishes and instead built his famous Cabanon directly behind E.1027, which dominates the narrative of the site to this day.

This unique hybrid docu-fiction is a story about the power of one woman’s creative expression and a man’s desire to control it.

"Eileen Gray was a creative genius and the first woman to conquer the world of architecture at a time when men controlled it all. This new film reflects on Gray’s impressive career and her stunning modernist house on the Cote d’Azur and will appeal to cineastes and lovers of art and design alike." -Meredith Taylor, Finito World

"Elegant and well thought-out, the film uses the cinematic medium to enrich a discourse dominated for too long by the arrogance of a few. Structured like a docufiction which brings together archive images, reenactments and a voice over that gently accompanies the images, the film shows moments of intimacy that we can only imagine. The shot compositions, the colours and the shapes within them, push us to see what Eileen Gray saw, the beauty of every instant." -Giorgia Del Don, Cineuropa