The 20th century has been a training ground for numerous famous furniture designers, but only a few can compete to the influence showed by Irish architect and designer Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray. a lot like her masters Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray inflamed the modern design movement and made some of the popular furniture designs of the 20th century.

Eileen Gray was given birth on August 9, 1878 at the little city of Enniscorthy, Ireland, and was the youngest of five children. Her father, a visual artist named James Maclaren Gray, observed Eileen’s love in the arts and fed that obsession by taking her to painting tours around Europe. during the time she was twenty, Gray was allowed at the well known Slade School of Fine Art of the University College London. But when her father died in 1900, Gray transferred to Paris and pursued her studies at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi, but she soon went back in 1905 so that she could take care of her mother. It was in this moment that Gray learned lacquer-work under the teachings of Seizo Sugawara, Japanese lacquer-work restorer worked at the Exposition Universelle.

Gray’s most noticeable decoration both in architecture and furniture design happened in 1914, when she was appointed to design the interior of an upscale apartment at the Rue de Lota in Paris. The apartment’s possessor, a rich millioner and boutique owner named Mathieu Levy, wanted Gray to confirm its interior to suit her high lifestyle. Eileen Gray then experienced five excrutiating years on the apartment and refurnishing everything, from the rugs to the walls, from scratch. Two of her most well-known work at the Rue de Lota apartment was her convertion of the wall mouldings with lacquered wood panels and the Bibendum Chair, a red leather chair with a emphasized back/armrest design made of two leather tubes.

as soon as the work was finished in 1921, Gray’s version of the apartment at Rue de Lota was recognized very positively, with critics calling her work a “triumph of modern living”. This critical victory, together with the very generous payment she received from Madame Levy, gave Eileen Gray a huge moral boost. She then opted to make her own shop, the Jean Desert, in Paris to show her designs as well as those of her companions in the industry.

Gray rested on October 31, 1976 at rue Bonaparte, Paris, but she still lovingly considered today as one of the famous furniture designers of the modern age. Her trademarks, of which includes the Bibendum and the Eileen Gray Side Table and Tube Lamp, are known as usual examples of modern design and are still being made as reproduction pieces.