The 20th century has been a battle ground for number popular furniture designers, but only a handful can reach 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 produced some of the legendary 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 artist named James Maclaren Gray, observed Eileen’s liking in the arts and took care that obsession by taking her to painting tours around Europe. at 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 came back in 1905 so that she could take care of her mother. It was in this time that Gray trained lacquer-work under the teachings of Seizo Sugawara, Japanese lacquer-work restorer worked at the Exposition Universelle.

Gray’s most noticeable creation both in architecture and furniture design happened in 1914, when she was appointed to fix 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 change its interior to suit her high lifestyle. Eileen Gray then used 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 highlighted back/armrest design made of two leather tubes.

immediately the the work was done in 1921, Gray’s version of the apartment at Rue de Lota was accepted very positively, with critics calling her work a “triumph of modern living”. This critical victory, together with the very generous compensation she received from Madame Levy, gave Eileen Gray a huge moral boost. She then opted to build 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 warmly kept in mind 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 typical examples of modern design and are still being made as reproduction pieces.