Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray, Tempe à Pailla, Castellar, France

Sotheby's Monte Carlo, Collection Eileen Gray, May 25, 1980, lot 272

Paul F. Walter, New York

Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg New York, December 11, 2002, lot 43

Galerie Anne Sophie Duval, Paris

Jacques Grange, Paris

Sotheby's Paris, Jacques Grange Collectionneur, November 21-22, 2017, lot 28

Private Collection, Paris

Sotheby's Paris, June 25, 2020, lot 35

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Eileen Gray: Designer 1879 - 1976, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, January 23-April 22, 1979

Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer, New York, 1987, p. 289 (for the present lot illustrated)

Philippe Garner, Eileen Gray, Design and Architecture, Cologne 2006, p. 87 (for a related example)

Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, Her Life and Work, London, 2009, pp. 124 and 314 (for the present lot illustrated)

Eileen Gray, exh. cat., Centre Pompidou, February 20-May 20, 2013, p. 192 (for a related example)

Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray, Dublin, 2015, p. 243 (for a related example)

This table will be included in the catalogue raisonné written by Mr. Patrice le Fay d'Extepare d'Ibarrola.

Designed and executed for Eileen Gray’s house Tempe à Pailla, the present table is a rare surviving piece of furniture from this interior. Tempe à Pailla is the second house Eileen Gray designed and built for herself, constructed between 1932 and 1934 above Menton, in the hillside village of Castellar in the south of France, not far from her earlier villa E-1027 but set away from the coast. The house sits on a hilly mountain road overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and takes its name from a local Provençal proverb: “With time and straw, the figs ripen.” Built with reinforced concrete and local stone, and incorporating an existing stone structure as part of its foundation, the house is modernist in character — white plastered walls, a flat roof, and strip windows — yet intimate and carefully scaled. Gray designed and oversaw its construction personally but was forced to abandon the house following the Nazi invasion of France during the Second World War. She sold the house in 1955 to the British painter Graham Sutherland and his wife Kathleen, who owned it until 1979.

The interior of Tempe à Pailla reflects Gray’s conviction that architecture and furniture should form a single, coherent whole. The theme of spatial flexibility runs throughout, achieved through mechanical moving components that rotate or slide, unfold, and contract — a choreography that expands the narrow dimensions of the house into a dwelling of far greater breadth. The house captures the essence of Gray’s modernist practice, an approach that fused architectural thinking with a sensibility for comfort, tactility, and refined material contrast.

Executed in sanded and carved pine, the materials chosen for the present table reveal Gray’s interest in surfaces that invite touch as well as viewing. The carving and sanding not only articulate the object’s contours but also underscore the hand of the maker. Supporting this warm, organic material is a chromium-plated metal base, introducing a distinctly modern contrast.

As one of the very few pieces of furniture known to survive from Tempe à Pailla, the present table represents an exceptionally rare opportunity to acquire a work by Eileen Gray.