Swiss Filmmaker Beatrice Minger Grapples with the Legacy of Irish Designer Eileen Gray

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 15 August 2025 13:33

Written by Brad Balfour

Irish designer Eileen Gray built a refuge on the Côte d‘Azur in 1929. Though she built the house for herself, it turned out to be a masterpiece and many people wanted to experience it years after she was gone. This first house was a discrete, avant-garde masterpiece. She named it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it.

Upon discovering the house, Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer Le Corbusier, a pioneer of what's now considered modern architecture, became intrigued and obsessed. He later covered the walls with murals and published photos of them. Gray described these paintings as vandalism and demanded restitution. He ignored her wishes and instead built his famous Cabanon directly behind E.1027, which dominates the narrative of the site to this day.

Swiss director Beatrice Minger decided to make a film, “E.1027-Eileen Gray and the House By the Sea,” about this narrative and transform it into a story about the power of female expression, and men’s desire to control it. Sleek and serene, the film captures the poetry of the house and of Gray's vision. 

In order to make the film — a hybrid of documentary and fictional narrative performed by actors — she cast Natalie Radmall-Quirke — an Irish actress, articulate in French. As Minger said, “She struck us as capturing a nucleus of Eileen Gray in a way that felt right. We didn’t look for a one-to-one representation, but instead sought a more abstract, more free interpretation. With Axel Moustache as Jean Badovici and Charles Morillon as Le Corbusier, we found the perfect counterparts.”

With co-writer/director Christoph Schaub, they crafted an unusual film to tell about a very unusual woman and creator. Writer /director Minger is based in Zurich and it was there, and in Berlin and Lausanne, that she studied Film, German Studies and Modern History. After graduating, she worked as Assistant Director and Script supervisor on various projects and directed short films and video clips.

Though the film enjoyed a short theatrical run, in coming to Amazon, Apple and Kanopy it is now having its streaming & home video launch on September 9, 2025.

Q: It took a lot to break out of the restraints of society at the time. What do you think made her such a different person?

Beatrice Minger: I think a big part of it comes from her personality. She was a nonconformist and a non-heterosexual who tended to stay out of any artist groups or associations. She was an introvert with an ambivalent relationship to the public. Coming from an aristocratic background, she had the privilege of not having to get married or make a living from her art. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have collaborators. She opened a workshop with Ethel Wyld and later opened a gallery to sell her furniture and carpets. Yet, she wasn’t dependent on making a profit. She didn’t have to comply with any commercial standards or business rules. This allowed her to be very independent and create outside the system, making her truly avant-garde.

Q: Making any film is hard enough but choosing to do this story takes a lot to get it made. What led you to be convinced to make this?

Beatrice Minger: I was fascinated by her life, spirit, strong artistic voice, and choices. She spoke to me. The same was true of the story surrounding the house and Le Corbusier’s violent intervention at its center. I had very strong and complex feelings about it and wanted to understand it. Moreover, I felt that the 1920s and the 2020s had a lot in common. There are many historical parallels, as well as similarities in terms of what preoccupies and moves people. I felt that I could tell a story with a deep emotional connection to the present day.

Q: How much do you think that Gray’s Irish heritage and experience informed her as an artist and as an individual?

Beatrice Minger: As I am not Irish myself, I can only make assumptions shaped by my conversations with Natalie Radmall-Quirke and Jennifer Goff. Goff is the curator of the NMI and is probably most familiar with Eileen Gray’s Irish heritage and her life in general. First, her aristocratic heritage shaped her life on an existential level. Although she never identified with the title, she felt the great responsibility that comes with being born into wealth.

She was well aware that without her privilege, she might not have been able to become an artist. She left Ireland early in life, supposedly because she disapproved of the renovations to her childhood home by her brother-in-law, which she considered completely tasteless.

This seems to have started a pattern throughout her life: once she left, she never went back, except when her mother died. Once she arrived in Paris, her life was also shaped by being a foreigner, albeit she had a network of mostly English-speaking artists. Being a foreigner always comes with a feeling of not belonging, which I think was part of her motivation to create “E.1027.” It was a place far away from home, different in light, colors, and climate, yet it was a place where she could belong. Yet, as we know, she left this house, too, and never went back.

Q: How did her family react to her iconoclastic ways and behavior?

Beatrice Minger: As far as I know, there wasn’t as much friction as one might assume given Eileen Gray’s nonconformist lifestyle. Her mother was eccentric and decided to marry outside her class — to a painter. Her father, who presumably shared her sensitivity and introverted character, supported her decision to become an artist. He often traveled to Europe to paint and took her with him. She was the youngest of five siblings, and, as she says in the film, nobody really cared what she was doing all day. This gave her a great sense of independence, as well as a sense of self-sufficiency — and probably also loneliness.

Q: I would assume that commercial consideration didn’t play much of a role in the making of this film but did you have an idea of what audience it would find?

Beatrice Minger: From the beginning of the project, the producers considered commercial aspects, such as appealing to an audience in the field of design and architecture. This audience appreciates artists’ biographies and the experience of seeing films in theaters. As the film changed topics and perspectives, we felt that we could bring the same audience with us and also speak about discourses around gender, patriarchy, and, not least, the formative decade of modernism: the 1920s.

There are many parallels between that time and today. I hoped the film would speak to a broader audience, mostly women who are hungry to see their point of view represented on the big screen. However, these are mostly conclusions from hindsight. To be completely honest, I was prepared to accept that an experimental film like this one would perhaps find its audience at film festivals, but who dares to dream of this response in cinemas?

Q: What kind of a response have you had now that the film has been released?

Beatrice Minger: The film was overwhelmingly well-received. It was popular at festivals and in cinemas across Europe and is now popular in the UK, Ireland, and the US. Most reviews were positive, appreciating the fascinating story told in such a different, experimental form. But I must give most of the credit to her. Her life and art continue to speak to us decades later.

Q: Looking back, were there things about her life and history you would like to have included?

Beatrice Minger: Oh, I had to leave out so many things! It’s always painful because you want to paint the most complex character possible. However, we didn’t want to simply create an artist’s biography; we wanted to weave the story threads around “E.1027.” This focus made it easier to leave things out and gave us the freedom to create space for other things –– for architecture and reflection.

Q: It must have been tough to organize all this info and make it coherent — who all the players are, etc. How did you meet the challenge?

Beatrice Minger: I read everything I could find and talked to everyone who knew her work better than I did. I absorbed all the information like a sponge. From all this information, I created something of an amalgam. Then, at one point, I had to let go of all the knowledge and create something from it.

Yet, I made sure to check in with the documents to ensure that I wasn’t getting carried away. I was careful to always have a document or story at hand that I could tie the text back to. I didn’t want to impose my own narrative on her; I wanted to listen carefully to what was there and follow her lead.

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