Gray, born in Ireland and working in Paris, was active during the same period as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, yet her work has only been internationally reevaluated since 2013. As a designer Gray began with art deco interiors and lacquerwork. The transition to modernist architecture and furniture followed in the 1920s—a time when a career as an architect was highly unusual for women. The Roquebrune design originated around 1927, building on her earlier experiments with steel tubing from circa 1925–26.[3]
Fig. 1: Eileen Gray, Roquebrune chair, ca. 1927, manufactured ca. 2023 by ClassiCon, on display now in Yesterday Today, the collection presentation featuring art and design from 1880 to 1950. Photo by the author.
Fig.2. Eileen Gray, Roquebrune chair, ca.1927, leather, tubular steel, Photo: ClassiCon
The chair has a slender tubular steel frame with a tightly stretched leather seat and backrest: light, functional, and suitable for mass production. Gray’s design is therefore entirely in keeping with the spirit of modernism, fitting seamlessly with the then-radically new tubular furniture by Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer that the Stedelijk is exhibiting.
Fig.3. Detail of Eileen Gray, Roquebrune chair, ca. 1927, manufactured ca. 2023 by ClassiCon, acquired 2024 for the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and currently on display in Yesterday Today, the collection presentation featuring art and design from 1880 to 1950. Photo by the author.
Nevertheless the Roquebrune differs from the cool, industrial aesthetic of the work of many of Gray’s male contemporaries.[4] The lace at the back can be tightened for personal seating depth and comfort, while also forming a visual accent. Aptly described as “laced up like a corset, the leather envelops the sitter’s back almost like a garment, suggesting lacing, fastening, and unfastening.[5] Thus the chair gains a sensual, corporeal presence rarely so explicit in modernist tubular furniture.[6]
Historical research shows that Gray participated in Parisian networks where female relationships were central. Her designs can be interpreted as part of a “sapphic modernity”: a modern culture from around 1900 to the 1930s–1940s in which references to Sappho—the Greek poet from Lesbos—signify female desire.[7] From a queer perspective the emphasis on the body and intimacy is meaningful. Networks of women in salons, cafés, and art circles shaped modern ideas about living, personal space, and privacy.[8]
Gray did not design homes with completely transparent, open spaces like Le Corbusier, but rather interiors with vistas, screens, and sheltered corners. Her work plays with the pleasure of suggestion: Objects and spaces are only partially revealed, never fully exposed.[9] Gray’s design philosophy can be summarized as “the objects to be seen keep pleasure in suspense”; it is precisely what is not immediately visible—but revealed only later—that arouses desire.[10]
The seemingly simple Roquebrune embodies Gray’s philosophy of suggestion and privacy through the lace-up closure at the back and a second lacing under the seat, both visible when inverted. These details evoke associations with clothing, gender expression, and the interplay between revealing and concealing. This seems to resonate with Gray’s preference for the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who describes the ideal lovers’ home as a place filled with furniture equipped with locks and secrets.[11]
Fig.4. Eileen Gray, Roquebrune chair, in a 1980s reissue in black leather, the lacing is even more prominently featured. Photography: Priority Seating.
The Roquebrune subtly suggests that modernism is not just a story of machines and straight lines. It is also a story of bodies, intimacy, and interiors for other ways of living together, beyond the heteronormative family.
This chair by the idiosyncratic Eileen Gray—woman, queer, designer, architect—is now on display at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In the collection presentation it adds a new voice to the story of the tubular steel chair, which until recently was mainly told through the male designers of De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
Tamara Klopper studied Design Cultures at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and works as a researcher at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In this capacity, she explores inclusive approaches as an alternative to the dominance of male perspectives and heteronormativity within traditional art and design theory.
[1] Recent production; model as produced by ClassiCon since 2004. First exhibited in the collection presentation Yesterday Today in December 2025, but arrangements vary.
[2] Chairs based on this design with leather upholstery were in Gray’s second home, the Villa Tempe à Pailla in Castellar, near Roquebrune in southern France.
[3] Dating based on Gray’s sketches, in which chair designs developed into variations on the same model.
[4] Vittoria Bonini, “A Place of Infinite Possibilities: Tempe à Pailla (1931–1935) in Castellar by Eileen Gray,” Docomomo Journal 73 (2025): 8–15.
[5] Characterization by ClassiCon, producer of Gray’s design reeditions since 2004.
[6] Breuer, Stam, and Mies van der Rohe applied stretched leather or fabric to tubular chairs. None of their chair designs are known to have a lace-fastening specifically on the backrest.
[7] Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II (London: Routledge, 2002), 463. Sappho (ca. 620–560 bce), the poetess from the island of Lesbos, famous for her female-oriented love poetry, such as in her Hymn to Aphrodite. Her fragments formed the origin of “lesbian” as a term for mutual female desires, derived from her island.
[8] Jasmine Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, eds., Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
[9] Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity, 116.
[10] Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity, 116.
[11] Baudelaire describes the ideal home for lovers: “The furniture is [ . . .] equipped with locks and secrets like refined souls”). Charles Baudelaire, “L’invitation au voyage,” in Le Spleen de Paris (Paris: n.p., 1869); quoted in Caroline Constant, “E. 1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 3 (1994): 278.
