In 1929, designer and architect Eileen Gray speculated that ‘one must anticipate that the present need for action, for a hectic life, will come to an end; that it will subside as soon as the effects of the war disappear and will be replaced by the need for inner knowledge and refinement’.⁹ Writing this, Gray herself had moved to an isolated and rocky stretch of the Mediterranean that overlooked the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the south of France, leaving behind considerable achievements as an interior designer in Paris. It was here that she launched herself as an architect, beginning work on a secluded modernist villa, all light reflecting white walls, horizontal hugging flat roof, and compactly minimal frame, which she was to name E. 1027. A progressive designer who found herself, for a time, among Le Corbusier’s inner circle, Gray was unique in her passionate defence of the need for spaces of solitude within buildings. She sensed that modern life and modern design were reducing such possibilities but that this would prove merely a temporary phenomenon.

It is intriguing to wonder, were she alive today, what Gray would make not only of the influence that technology now exerts in diminishing our privacy but also, from a design perspective, how the changing nature of buildings is arguably re-engineering our relationship to solitude. As notions of accessibility, openness and connectivity continue to gain greater traction as drivers of much contemporary design, solitude as an ideal now appears almost antiquated. But in Gray’s eyes, buildings had to offer some measure of privacy if they were to succeed as shelters for the imagination. It was a view echoed by the renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who went against the grain in his 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize acceptance speech by praising solitude: ‘Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself,’ he said. ‘Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.’¹⁰