Eileen Gray's E-1027 Table Was Built for Breakfast in Bed

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on October 31, 1976, Eileen Gray died in Paris at the age of 98. She was buried at Père Lachaise in a grave that, according to Wikipedia, is still unmarked. By then most people who owned one of her designs had no idea who she was. They knew the small round side table with the glass top and the chrome frame that slides under the edge of a sofa or a bed, and they knew it as the E-1027.

The table is named after a house, and the house is named after a relationship. Both stories are worth knowing before you buy the table, because they explain why it looks the way it does.

From Wexford to the Paris lacquer trade

Gray was born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith on August 9, 1878, at Brownswood, near Enniscorthy in County Wexford, Ireland. She studied fine art at the Slade School in London from 1900 to 1902, where she first learned lacquer work from a furniture restorer. In Paris she trained with Seizo Sugawara, a Japanese lacquer craftsman, from about 1907, and in 1910 they opened a lacquer workshop together.

Lacquer made her name. Her 1917 redesign of an apartment on the rue de Lota for Juliette Lévy is often counted among the key interiors of Art Deco, and from 1922 to 1930 she ran a shop called Jean Désert to sell her rugs and furniture. One of her lacquered Dragons armchairs sold in 2009 for 21.9 million euros, a record at the time for 20th-century decorative art.

But by the mid 1920s she had moved on to something else entirely. She was teaching herself architecture.

A house with a code for a name

She learned it informally while in a relationship with Jean Badovici, an architect who also edited a magazine. Between 1926 and 1929 the two of them built a villa on the coast at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in the Alpes-Maritimes. It is L-shaped and flat-roofed, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a spiral stair to the guest room. They called it E-1027. The E is Eileen, the 10 is J for Jean, the 2 is B for Badovici and the 7 is G for Gray, counting letters of the alphabet.

Who designed it is still argued over. Badovici devoted an issue of his magazine to the house and presented himself as joint architect. Jennifer Goff, a curator at the National Museum of Ireland, found that all the surviving plans are in Gray's hand alone, and concludes that Badovici was first a client and only second a consultant architect.

The couple separated soon after the house was finished, and by 1932 it belonged to Badovici. Between 1938 and 1939 Le Corbusier, staying as Badovici's guest, painted murals on its walls. Gray regarded them as vandalism. If the Le Corbusier circle interests you, his cousin and partner turns up in our piece on Pierre Jeanneret's Chandigarh chairs.

The table and the crumbs

Gray furnished E-1027 herself, and the side table was part of that kit. The Wikipedia entry for the table gives the year as 1927 and the materials as steel and glass. ClassiCon's drawings show how it works. The base is an open ring rather than a closed circle, and the stem rises from one side of it, so the frame can slide under a bed or a sofa and bring the round top over your lap. The stem telescopes, so the same table can sit low beside a sofa or rise to bed height.

The usual story is that Gray designed it for her sister, who liked to eat breakfast in bed. Wikipedia presents that as a suggestion rather than an established fact, and its article on the house adds that the top was designed to catch crumbs before they reached the sheets. It is a domestic origin for a piece that ended up in design museums.

It is also a very Bauhaus-era object. Tubular steel had just arrived in furniture through Marcel Breuer's club chair, the one now sold as the Wassily, and our Bauhaus history explains how fast it spread. Gray took the same material and used it for something small, movable and private.

The E-1027 table by the numbers

Sources disagree on the metal. Wikipedia lists stainless steel, while the licensed maker uses chrome-plated steel.

Lost, then found again

Gray's career went quiet for decades. She was interned during the Second World War, and many of her papers and drawings were lost. Interest in her work revived from 1967, and a retrospective in London in 1972 brought her back into view.

The turning point for the table came in 1973, when she signed a contract with Aram Designs of London to put her designs back into production. Zeev Aram had already been championing her work. Today ClassiCon makes the table as the sole worldwide licensee, in coordination with Aram Designs.

The house had a rougher time. The French state bought it in 1999, and by 2013 restoration had cost 600,000 euros, with some architects criticizing departures from Gray's intent. The Getty Foundation gave a grant of 200,000 dollars in 2016. E-1027 finally opened to the public in July 2021, by guided tour only, in groups of no more than 12.

Buying and living with one

The E-1027 is widely copied, so check what you are buying. A licensed piece should come from ClassiCon or Aram, and the adjustment should be smooth and lock firmly at height. Clear glass keeps it almost invisible next to a sofa. The smoked or black versions read more like a piece of furniture.

It pairs well with heavy upholstery, which is exactly what it was designed for. Put one beside an Egg chair or a deep sofa and it does its original job of bringing the surface to you. For more furniture and architecture stories, see the full Design section.

If you ever make the trip to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, book the tour well ahead. The house is small, the groups are smaller, and the table that started there is probably already in your living room.