When not in use, Eileen Gray’s 1920s cabinet appears to be a smooth, undisturbed unit, its straight lines finessed into a pleasing curve at one end. When opened, it performs an elegant choreography, each drawer swinging out elegantly from the frame. The wooden cabinet, designed for the pioneering Irish designer and architect’s famed E-1027 villa in the south of France, epitomized her design ethos: modernist but not machine-like. Its four drawers, contained within a white-painted body, pivot outward to reveal their contents, creating a new dynamic between user and object: not the abrupt pull that traditional drawers require but a smooth, quiet, serpentine glide.