Best known for her work with lacquer, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) had a fascinating and multifaceted artistic career: she became a designer of ornaments, furniture, interiors, and eventually homes. Though her attention shifted from smaller objects to the very large, she always focused on details, even details that were forever hidden. In Paris she studied the Japanese tradition of lacquer, employing wood surfaces—e.g., bowls, screens, furniture—for the application of the clear, hard-drying liquid. It is a time-consuming craft, then little known in Europe, that superimposes layer upon layer, sometimes involving twenty layers or more. The tradition of lacquer fit well with her artistic sensibilities, as Gray eschewed the flowing, leafy lines of the Art Nouveau movement that had flourished in Paris, preferring the austere beauty of straight lines and simple forms juxtaposed.

In addition to requiring painstaking layering, the wood used in lacquer work must be lacquered on both sides to prevent warping. This tension between aesthetic demands and structural requirements, which invests Gray's work in lacquer with an architectural quality, is critical but not always apparent: a folding screen or door panel reveals more of the artist's work than does a flat panel, which hides one side. In Gray's early work she produced flat panels; later she made door panels and even unfolded the panels into screens. In a screen she made for the lobby of an apartment, she fully realizes the implications of this expansion from two to three dimensions: the screen juts out from a wall, and that wall visually disintegrates into panels of lacquered bricks on the screen. The screen thus becomes a painting, a piece of furniture, and an architectural element all at once. She subsequently became heavily invested in the design of furniture, often tailoring pieces to fit a particular interior environment. She often used modern materials, such as tubular steel, to create furniture and environments that, though visually austere, meet their occupants' needs.

Gray's work in both lacquer and interior design prefigures her work as an architect. She did not believe that one should divorce the structural design of the exterior from the design of the interior. She designed the interior elements of a house together with the more permanent structures, as an integrated whole. Architecture for her was like work in lacquer: it could only be achieved from the inside out. But in architecture we discover the hidden layers; in fact we inhabit them. We find storage cabinets in the recesses of a staircase, desks that are also cabinets, and tables that are set on pivots to serve different functions in different contexts. One such table can be positioned either outside, on a balcony, or inside the house. Gray placed a carpet underneath it in each location, as though to underscore that there is no important distinction between exterior and interior.