E.1027

She built a house for herself. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a masterpiece.

Irish designer Eileen Gray built a refuge on the Côte d‘Azur in 1929. Her first house is a discrete, avant-garde masterpiece. She named it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it.

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 is a story about the power of one woman’s creative expression and a man’s desire to control it.