A new docu-fiction film exploring the life and work of pioneering architect Eileen Gray and her avant-garde home on the French Riviera is now available to stream. “E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea,” directed by Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub, is currently showing on Play RTS through February 12.
Zurich-based filmmakers Minger and Schaub’s film offers a cinematic journey into the mind of the Irish creator. In 1929, Gray, alongside architect Jean Badovici, built a secluded retreat in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur. The resulting home is a discreet yet groundbreaking masterpiece.
Gray named the villa E.1027, a mysterious combination of her and Badovici’s initials. When architect Le Corbusier discovered the house, he was captivated, even obsessed.
>. > See the film “E.1027 – Maison en bord de mer”:
A Mysterious Life
Minger initially began studying Le Corbusier when she stumbled upon the story of E.1027 and its creator, who she found “much more fascinating than Le Corbusier,” she explained in an interview with Vertigo in May 2025, upon the film’s release. “I knew some furniture and other small things she had done, but I had no idea about the biography of this woman, nor the world in which she lived. For me, that’s really at the heart of this story.”
To research Gray’s life, the director gathered articles from L’Architecture Vivante, an avant-garde architecture magazine published between 1923 and 1933 and edited by Jean Badovici, as well as a handful of letters. The material is fragmented, as the Irish artist destroyed all of her correspondence and her private life remains largely enigmatic.
>> Listen to the interview with director Beatrice Minger about her film “E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea”:
From the Inside Out
Gray’s career path is unique. A pioneer of the modernist movement, she became an architect alongside Jean Badovici. She believed a house should be built around the human being, and not the other way around – a revolutionary idea for its time.
“I think she was first and foremost an interior designer (…), she worked from the inside out. She always started with the body, with the human being. (…) She really crossed that line into a rather masculine territory, that of architecture,” Minger noted.
>> See the Ramdam program dedicated to women architects:
Eileen Gray, a Free Woman
The film reveals that the house reflects the person she was at the time: a free woman who went against the norms of her era. “She was really non-conformist, non-heterosexual too (Eileen Gray was openly lesbian, ed. Note). (…) She was a particularly independent artist, who put all her strength into her work. (…) And I think that’s something that really fascinated Le Corbusier. He didn’t really understand what she did. (…)”
By the time Le Corbusier saw the house, Eileen Gray no longer lived there. Jean Badovici offered Le Corbusier the opportunity to paint murals on the walls, for a fee. Gray, who wanted her walls immaculate and uncluttered, opposed these paintings; this conflict between the two architects remains unclear today.
For Minger, it’s now well known that Le Corbusier was fascinated by the house, to the point where something changed for him. (…) He was perhaps jealous, or perhaps [the house represented] a [too] different, [too] strange point of view for him. He didn’t understand and felt a tension, a friction within himself that he couldn’t bear. And so he decided to carry out a rather violent intervention in this architecture. For the film, I really wanted to provide a context that allows justice to be done to all the different levels of this story.”
Reported by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Web adaptation: Melissa Härtel
“E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea” by Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub, starring Charles Morillon, Axel Moustache, Natalie Radmall-Quirke, Vera Flück. Available on
until February 12, 2026.
