Focus on tubular steel furniture

Who would have thought that one of the first people to design and make tubular steel furniture would be Irish — and a woman?

Eileen Gray, a native of Wexford started a revolution in furniture design in the first half of the 20th century, and her coup was made all the more significant as she was the only woman among a circle of brilliant new designers in the 1920s — a list which included Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.

What was probably one of her greatest talents — an aesthetic that singles her out to this day — was taking the geometric furniture forms so popular in the modernist period of the 1920s and ’30s and adding a luxuriant quality. The Bibendum chair is a perfect example, with its composition of semi-circular tubes finished in leather, and, rather wittily, being named after the character created by Michelin to sell its tyres.