Eileen Gray’s Very Important Hermès Mailbox

the entrance to la villa e-1027 is concrete or stucco painted dark blue, with a hideous mural by le corbusier in orange yellow and green facing the hapless visitor. in the center of the photo by manuel bougot, and thus on the left wall of the entrance, is a lamp attached to the wall, a thinly painted square of glass held by two aluminum brackets, very raw, exposed, industrial. below is a black saddle leather mailbox held to the wall with a palladium bracket. it is by hermes but no one told me i had to find out about it myself by stumbling into the artcurial benefit auction catalogue from 2019
Eileen Gray’s Hermès mailbox, replicated by Hermès in 2018 for E-1027, here seen in a print donated by photographer Manuel Bougot to Artcurial’s June 2019 auction for Association Cap Moderne

I don’t know how I can be thirty years and a week into a fairly fervent admiration of Eileen Gray and only be finding out now that her original mailbox at E-1027 was made out of an Hermès saddle bag. And that in 2018 Hermès made a replacement, which I must have walked past multiple times, without knowing—was it actually even there? Yes, there it is in Iwan Baan’s photo.

an hermes mailbox that seems to be about the size of a laptop but 20cm thick, is made of black saddle leather, with a palladium backet, a palladium ringed hole in the lower center, to see into, and what looks like a palladium ring on the side, perhaps to open it. the letters spelling lettres are stamped in silver on the face. it's attached next to a thin vertical window, on the deep blue wall of the entrance of the villa e-1027, by eileen gray, who designed the house and the original mailbox, made from an hermes saddlebag, in 1929. this is 1 of 2 replicated by hermes, the other of which was sold at artcurial in 2019, in an auction where this photo came from
Hermès boîte aux lettres unique [sic], a 2018 replica of Eileen Gray’s original 1929 design, also fabricated by/from Hermès, created in an edition of two. image via Artcurial

And there it is in Manuel Bougot’s photograph of the entrance of E-1027, a print of which he donated to the 2019 Artcurial auction to benefit the Association Cap Moderne, which led the restoration of E-1027. The auction that included an overnight stay for two in the E-1027 guest room, but who cares? Because the Hermès “boîte aux lettres unique“ was not, in fact unique; it was “Faite main et sur mesure par la Sellerie Hermès en deux exemplaires en 2018, une pour la Villa E1027, une pour vous.”

Pour moi? Mais, non! Because I did not know. Also I did not bid €11,000 for it.

a black and white photo from 1929 of the entrance to e-1027 by eileen gray has the black leather hermes mailbox on a grayish wall at the center, abutting a thin vertical window that runs from floor to ceiling. the top pane of the window is open. a light fixture of a pane of glass and a lightbulb is above the mailbox. to the right is the passageway to the service entrance. the wall on the right has yet to be vandalized by le corbusier, image by editions albert morancé by l'arch. vivante in 1929
photo of the boîte aux lettres et al published in the portfolio, E1027 Maison en bord de mer, by l’Architecture vivante in winter 1929

But now I have une question. Because the English auction listing said this is “replicating precisely the one made by Eileen Gray from a Hermès saddle-bag in 1929 for E1027,” while the French text says it was made from “à partir d’une selle Hermès,” which, I understand selle to be a saddle. So far I can find no info about the original mailbox at all, much less what Hermès product Gray might have chopped up to make it.

The c. 1929 photo of the boîte published in Jean Badovici’s own architecture magazine does indeed look just like the Hermès replica. According to Peter Adam, Gray put the hole in the box and a mirror in the window so you could check the mail from bed. But my limited mind cannot conceive how it is reworked from a bag, and not just made to Gray’s design from saddle leather. Does the original still exist to have been replicated? Are there some archives that need diving into to solve this mystery? Because now that I know it existed, I can’t figure out why, at this point, it’s not a mailbox, a bag, or both..