SOME OF MY FAVORITE STORIES are stories of houses. “The Spoils of Poynton,” about a house full of beloved antiquities. “Rebecca,” about a house haunted by a first wife. Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”: a house that takes over parenting. I love James Lees-Milne’s stories of National Trust houses, postwar stories of houses built on dynasties and coming apart. Then there is the special house, the one built on love, for a muse, a mistress, an adored spouse. In Virginia Woolf’s brief masterpiece “A Haunted House,” the ghosts are content, the walls of the house thrumming with whispers of peace, a happy marriage.1

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EILEEN GRAY WAS 51 YEARS OLD when she completed her first private residence. It was a white Modernist villa on a slope descending to the sea in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, a small village on the Côte d’Azur. Her lover, the Romanian architect and editor of L’Architecture Vivante, Jean Badovici, was 36 when they moved in, in 1929. The house was situated between the train tracks and the beach, among rocks and pine trees with a view of the bay of Monaco. Seen from the sea, it resembles a white yacht anchored behind reddish rocks. In designing the house Gray adopted a number of precepts formulated by the architect Le Corbusier in the mid-1920s. The structure stands on thin stilts, the windows form a horizontal band. Badovici was a close friend of Le Corbusier, and Le Corbusier and Gray knew each other from Paris. She was nine years Le Corbusier’s senior and one of the best-known furniture designers of her time. But Gray was the darker of the two. She was a close friend of the occult celebrity Aleister Crowley and had an open affair with the singer Damia. The two women cruised the boulevards of Paris wearing Lanvin, a panther curled up in the back seat of their car.2

But Badovici only occasionally used the house. Gray separated from him in 1932, left E.1027 to him and built herself a new house in Castellar. At Badovici’s invitation, Le Corbusier holidayed in E.1027 with his wife, Yvonne, and in 1938 to 1939 painted the interior walls with erotic murals. He called them “a gift” for his hostess, but Gray saw them as an act of vandalism, almost of revenge. Later, during World War II, German soldiers used the walls for target practice.3

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• 1. It was beautiful. It was a wreck. It blistered on the rocky hillside: a perfect dome, gray weathered concrete and granite connected by a bridge to an eroded staircase. The day was warm and bright, the interiors were crumbling and stuffy. Some rooms contained odd bits of dusty ’60s Italian modern furniture, bright-green glazed tiles and faded taupe cushions. An Italian paperback copy of Patricia Cornwell’s “Cause of Death” was left on a kitchen countertop. Looking around the main room, it was easy to imagine Vitti stepping carefully, cinematically, barefoot down the banister-free staircase that Antonioni built to watch her descend. But by 1972, Vitti and Antonioni were at the end of their affair. I climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. The old mattress on the bed was covered in blue flowers.
• 2. Though Gray’s house has a clinical air when seen from the outside (painted pure white like many early Modernist buildings), it is unexpectedly dim inside. The effect is of slipping into progressively deeper water, as one reaches the house’s most intimate corners, which are decorated in dark blue or black. E.1027, as the house is known, nods to Le Corbusier only at first sight. The spiral of the stairs, to Gray, represented both a physical form and metaphor — and she used it as a basis for a critique of Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a “machine for living,” a phrase he had coined. A house, Gray once wrote, is “not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man — his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation.” “The poverty of modern architecture,” she later added, “stems from the atrophy of sensuality.”
• 3. Badovici died in 1956. Le Corbusier, who had built himself a wooden shack, the Cabanon, within sight of E.1027, always wanted to acquire the house. Finally a friend of his, the wealthy Swiss gallerist and furniture dealer Marie-Louise Schelbert, bought the villa. Gray never returned to the house.