Best known for her work with lacquer, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) had a fascinating and multifaceted artistic career: she became a designer of ornaments, furniture, interiors, and eventually homes. Though her attention shifted from smaller objects to the very large, she always focused on details, even details that were forever hidden. In Paris that had flourished in Paris, preferring the austere beauty of straight lines and simple forms juxtaposed.
In addition to requiring painstaking layering, the wood used in lacquer work must be lacquered on both sides to prevent warping. This tension between aesthetic demands and structural requirements, which invests Gray’s work in lacquer with an architectural quality, is critical but not always apparent: a folding screen or door panel reveals as tubular steel, to create furniture and environments that, though visually austere, meet their occupants’ needs.
Gray’s work in both lacquer and interior design prefigures her work as an architect. She did not believe that one should divorce the structural design of the exterior from the design of the interior. She designed the interior elements of a house together with the more permanent structures, as an integrated whole. each location, as though to underscore that there is no important distinction between exterior and interior.
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