Eileen Gray completed Tempe á Pailla 90 years ago.
Photo: Courtesy of Engel & Völkers
A French Riviera Modernist Gem Designed and Built by Eileen Gray Hits the Market
The trailblazing architect's lesser known project, Tempe à Pailla, was extended by late British painter Graham Sutherland and is on the market for 3.5 million euros
If walls could talk, this avant-garde hilltop refuge would be buzzing with stories about the mind-boggling creativity of its two successive owners, Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) and British painter, Graham Sutherland (1926-1980).
Exactly ninety years ago, Eileen Gray—a trailblazer of the Parisian Art Deco scene with no formal training in architecture—completed her second Modernist home, a mini-masterpiece anchored to a rocky terrain in the remote heights of Castellar, near Menton. Hidden away on a steep winding road, the small white and blue-shuttered house had unencumbered vistas of granite mountains, a lush valley and a swathe of sparkling sea, off in the distance. Miraculously, those glorious views haven’t changed over time.
Graham Sutherland and his wife Kathleen Sutherland in 1974. Photo: The Edward Quinn Archive
“Memories cling to things, so it’s better to start anew,” Gray once wrote. The first house she’d built from 1926 to 1929 in nearby Roquebrune-Cap-Martin was the white flat-roofed seaside villa E-1027—an experimental holiday home pour deux. But when she and her lover, “Bado” (Jean Badovici) a Paris-based Romanian architect, split in 1932, Gray moved out, leaving behind her now-iconic furniture. New plans were afoot: having also purchased 1.5 acres in Castellar, Gray tore down the existing shepherd’s hut to rebuild a spartan nautical-inspired two-story house with a concrete bridge and stairs that led to the garden, adding vines and a lemon grove. Less playful than Villa E-1027, this 1000-square-feet retreat, named Tempe á Pailla after an old Provencal proverb (“with time and straw, the figs ripen”), was a versatile space delineated by black, white and yellow, in constant dialogue with sunlight and nature.
A zinc bathtub remains from the home's original build. Photo: Courtesy of Engel & Völkers
Ingenious multi-functional inventions prevailed: sliding shutters, port-hole windows, a cubic chest of pivoting drawers, a cork-topped table, and a collapsing perforated wood S-bend canvas chair for easy storage. Today, Tempe á Pailla still boasts original fittings from its glory days—Gray’s (albeit chipped) black-tiled terrace sunbed, a kitchen fold-out ironing board, a built-in extendable curved metal wardrobe, a zinc bathtub, a brick fireplace hidden by a screen, and the remarkable “ceiling eye”, a round hole attached to a metal disk that regulated the light streaming into the master bedroom.
Fast forward to 1945 post-war France when Gray was finally able to return to Tempe á Pailla—she found it vandalized by German soldiers, her furniture, looted, her drawings, burned. After a half-hearted renovation, Gray put Tempe a Pailla on the market; in 1955, it was sold to painter Graham Sutherland, best known for his Surrealist abstractions of landscapes.
A bedroom in Tempe á Pailla, the home Eileen Gray completed 90 years ago. Photo: Engel & Völkers
The artist and his wife, Kathleen, set about planting a 36-acre jungle of exotic vegetation from Datura flowers to palms (soon to become a regular motif in Sutherland’s paintings). By 1970, they’d added a more luxurious split-level house with a studio and a sprawling open-plan living room, plus a south-facing dining room and kitchen and a terrace overlooking the garden. Rebaptized “La Villa Blanche”, architect Tom Wilson included nods to Gray’s innovations—porthole windows, a zinc tub—and left the Gray-designed section (the caretaker’s quarters) unchanged. The Sutherland-designed twisty vine furniture dominated the living room, casting bewitching shadows.
Over the years, Sutherland entertained the likes of Greta Garbo and Helena Rubenstein, whom he painted. His famously unforgiving portraits include everyone from Somerset Maugham to a dismayed Winston Churchill; Lady Churchill had it secretly burned.
The breathtaking view. Photo: Courtesy of Engel & Völkers
In 1967, after Italian filmmaker and art collector Pier Paolo Ruggerini made a documentary on Sutherland, Lo Specchio e il miraggio, they became close friends. The Sutherlands enjoyed life at the art-filled Villa Blanche until 1979; however, after the artist’s death, the abandoned house fell into disrepair. Administrative battles ensued until Ruggerini and his wife, Marzia, acquired ownership in 1996 and painstakingly restored everything as it had been, converting the studio into a bedroom.
Classified as a historical monument since 1990 (though the plaque only mentions Sutherland), Tempe a Pailla/La Villa Blanche is, once again, for sale, waiting behind rusty gates to be shined up to its former dazzling beauty.
Tempe à Pailla is currently on the market through Engel & Völkers for the asking price of 3.5 million euros
Cover: Eileen Gray completed Tempe á Pailla 90 years ago.
Photo: Courtesy of Engel & Völkers
