Review: 'E.1027 - Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea'
- Ali Hussain
- May 26
- 4 min read
Director Beatrice Minger’s documentary, E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (2025), feels as much a meditation as it does a factual account. Together with co-director Christoph Schaub and cinematographer Ramon Giger, she has crafted a film which is as transformative and subtle as the work of her subject, the pioneering Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray. This is told brilliantly through the prism of her most famous creation.
The modern, code-named villa on the coast of the French Riviera, E.1027 – more than a title or opus – stands out as the soul of the film. From the first frame the masterwork is treated as a character in its own right; a structure which breathes, listens, and remembers. We open in dreamlike fashion, at blue hour, with wind rushing off the Mediterranean and a balcony facing the horizon. As we slowly view jump-cuts of the coast, frame-by-frame the dawn steadily brightens and light floods into the harmony of the rooms. The opening is an immediate showcase of the assertive cinematography – its symmetry, control, and deep awareness of the architectural precision of its subject. The result is a deeply immersive experience of walking through a memory suspended in air.
The story unfolds curiously in layers through suggestion and space, as Minger resists the impulse to create a simple biopic and instead chooses to frame Gray’s life as a collage of images, quotations, and reenactments. Gray’s narration in the documentary is drawn from her own writings and voiced with quiet restraint by Natalie Radmall-Quirke, who portrays her dually as a figure present and removed bearing witness to a legacy altered by others. “But by then I had already left,” she says of the house, “I never went back.” This departure and separation becomes a central motif which the film effuses on multiple levels, from its vast framing to its sparse design. Gray designed E.1027 as a shared space for herself and her partner, Jean Badovici, before parting with it – unaware that her rightful accreditation to the house and place in Modernist history would be left behind too.
The staging of the film further reinforces this sense of an elusive presence. Much of E.1027 unfolds on an abstract soundstage where the eerie and pared-back setting seems to abstract action into recollection. Objects are isolated, places stripped down to symbols: a car is evoked by two chairs, a room by a single shaft of light. Gray walks between projected images of her past, her figure flickering among fragments, never fully reconstituted. This effect mirrors her long dislocation from the cultural record until she began to garner recognition in the 1970s and onwards . Rather than re-enact her life with total realism, Minger’s choice to render it as a series of textures, silences and superimpositions is an effective formal decision which literalises the quality of her elusive legacy. The blurring of this line between documentary and dreamscape has a subtly tragic effect, as though declaring to the audience: this is all that remains, and this could be the only faithful way of depicting it. The result is immersive, partial, and moving. Minger doesn’t explain Gray, instead offering her a room to return to, however briefly.
The later intrusion of Le Corbusier seems to loom early in the documentary, through the melancholic narration and ambient sense of nostalgia. While staying at E.1027 after Gray had left, he painted eleven murals directly onto the house’s pristine white walls, without her consent and against the visual logic of her design. These acts were defended as invention or homage, but here are presented plainly for the defacement that they were. The camera does not rush past them, instead lingering long enough for the violation to sink in. Gray’s absence becomes starker in the face of this imposed presence. The film does not offer judgment, nor does it need to, as his actions speak clearly. The act is framed not as an act of reverence or tribute, but as an assertion of dominance and a territorial gesture. The documentary allows us to sit with this history and to recognise it as part of a wider pattern of misogyny and suppression of credit in the arts and beyond.
Nonetheless , the film hardly reduces Gray to a victim. Her work pulses with quiet authority, and her words carry the force of someone who thought through every line she ever drew. The film might benefit from a more traditional approach, whether its minimalist telling fully captures the emotional depth of Gray’s human story is questionable. However, its dreamlike approach, while occasionally distancing, firmly mirrors the spectral nature of Gray’s place in art culture. Ultimately, E.1027 is more about a way of seeing and remembering than it is about a house. Subtle, perhaps, but powerfully atmospheric, the film effectively offers Gray the space that she was once denied.
Edited By Emily Henman, Co-Film and TV Editor
