Like a sleek white yacht stranded among rocks and lemon trees, the house sits on a steep hillside. “She built a house for herself. Unfortunately, it became her masterpiece” reads the poster for the documentary ” E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea,” which opens in German cinemas on 24 October.

To be precise, the Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) designed the house with the curious name E.1027, which she also called “my boat”, in the 1920s for herself and her lover at the time, the Romanian architect Jean Badovici. Both their names are encoded in E.1027: E for Eileen, 10 for Jean (J being the 10th letter of the alphabet), 2 for Badovici and 7 for Gray. The gleaming white summer house, which Gray worked on for years and largely financed herself, was completed in 1929. Just two years later, she left the house and never returned. The film is said to capture the history of the famous villa, now regarded as Gray’s ultimate iconic Gesamtkunstwerk, in breathtaking images. Numerous pieces of furniture, lighting and carpets designed by Gray for E.1027 are still part of the ClassiCon portfolio and were made available for the film’s production.

At ‘Cap Modern’ in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur, where E.1027 is located with a spectacular view of the Principality of Monaco, stands Le Corbusier’s ‘Cabanon’, his minimalist holiday home. Corbusier, who stayed at E.1027 several times while visiting his friend Badovici, died on 27 August 1965 on the nearby beach of Cabbé. He was fascinated by Gray’s architecture. He even painted several murals in the villa, which Gray called vandalism and demanded be removed – a request Corbusier ignored. The two buildings continue to rival each other on the site, telling a story about the power of female creativity and the desire of men to control it. Actress Natalie Radmall-Quirke, according to the film’s announcement, “brings the character of Eileen Gray to life, reflecting her indomitable creative energy as well as her doubts in her conflicts with her seemingly overbearing male counterparts Jean Badovici and Le Corbusier”. In the final moments of the docu-fiction, the elderly Eileen Gray herself appears in original interview footage.