Heartbreak House: Frank McNally on Eileen Gray’s troubled relationship with her childhood home

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In the meantime, the commissioner of the plaque, lawyer and human rights activist Bill Shipsey, thought it might be a nice idea to get a stone from Brownswood House in…

Greystones reader Frank Kavanagh worries that the late designer Eileen Gray might not have appreciated my efforts in bringing stones from Wexford to commemorate her in Paris last week (Diary, November 4th).

As I mentioned then, the Halloween just gone was the 50th anniversary of Gray’s death. To mark which occasion, admirers unveiled a new plaque at the columbarium in Père-Lachaise cemetery, her second-last resting place.

That’s where her ashes used to reside and may do again, if and when they can be relocated from whichever general ossuary they were moved to, after a lease lapsed.

In the meantime, the commissioner of the plaque, lawyer and human rights activist Bill Shipsey, thought it might be a nice idea to get a stone from Brownswood House in Enniscorthy, where Gray grew up, to place in her new “niche”.

In the event, with the help of occasional Enniscorthy resident Oisín Ó Nualláin, I brought two small stones from Brownswood, and some fallen leaves into the bargain.

But as our Greystones correspondent reminds me, Gray had very mixed feelings about her birthplace, at least in the form it had taken by the time she left, circa 1900.

The original home, an elegant Georgian manor house, was gone then, replaced by a mock-Tudor mansion. One commentator called the latter “a magnificent specimen of Elizabethan architecture, with a charming parterre laid out in faultless style”.

Gray, to the contrary, considered it an atrocity against architecture, and against the happier memories of her childhood. Later in life, she always kept a photograph of the old house – or just “the house” as she called it.

Mind you, even that had been a cold place, physically and otherwise. Biographer Peter Adam writes that as the youngest of five children, most of them many years older, Eileen felt “lonely and unloved”. He adds:

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