Over her career Eileen Gray designed nearly fifty works of architecture. Only three were ever realized.

The first and most famous of Eileen Gray’s built works is a seaside villa designed in 1926. Located along the Mediterranean near Monaco, Gray was unable to purchase the property because she lacked French citizenship, leading to its acquisition under the name of her then romantic partner Jean Badovici. The home was titled E.1027 as a creative fusion of the couple’s names. With her design Gray sought a complete unity of exterior and interior elements, complicating the distinction between architecture and interior design. Ahead of her time, and her contemporaries, Gray rejected the austere rigidity of modernism advanced most vocally by famed architect Le Corbusier. Instead, she sought to humanize and enrich the principles of modernism stating “the dominance of reason, order and math leave a house cold and inhumane.” For her, the home was a place for living. In fact, one of her most iconic furnishings - an adjustable height chrome and glass side table - was designed for eating toast in bed without getting crumbs on the sheets.

Sadly, Gray lost control of E.1027 after the end of her relationship with Badovici, eventually leading to its partial defacement by Le Corbusier, a move speculated to be fueled by some measure of personal animus and jealousy. Throughout her long and prolific career, Gray had the opportunity to complete only two other architectural assignments, robbing the world of a clearer efflorescence of her creative vision. Disrupted by war and stymied by sexism, the breadth, beauty and sheer originality of her work was nearly lost to history - often being attributed to either Badovici or Corbusier. In fact, for much of her life, Gray’s designs existed at the margins of the field she helped shape.

One of the architectural works that never made it past pencil on paper was the House for Two Sculptors. Upon her passing at the age of 98, the House for Two Sculptors lived on in her archive as a rarely published set of drawings. It was in one of those publications, a book entitled “Eileen Gray, Designer” by J. Stewart Johnson, that ninety years after its conception Egg Collective’s co-founders discovered the unrealized work. Of her architectural practice, Stewart wrote:

“Many of the ideas Eileen Gray was unable to build, she nonetheless worked through with plans, technical drawings, and elaborate models.”

Conceived of in 1933, the House for Two Sculptors furthest evolution is documented by four hand-drawn elevations, one plan, and one chipboard model (pictured here). Little more is known about the project. Its clients, site and broader inspiration have been lost to history.