Throughout her education, Eileen was investigating surface, pushing and pulling it into three dimensions, engaging it in a dialogue with craft. From the education in drawing and painting she received in both London and Paris, she investigated the limits of the vertical, two dimensional surface. In 1905, she returned to London and discovered lacquer. Attracted by the texture and craft, she began an internship working in the Oriental lacquer repair shop of Mr. Charles. In 1906 she went back to Paris with sample materials and contacts with people who were working in that field. She met Sougarawa.

Lacquer work builds upon the working and reworking of the two dimensional surface, fading layers onto one another. It is a very laborious craftwork that implies the superposition of sometimes more than twenty layers. Repetition is fundamental to this process, like the practicing of scales for the musician. In Gray's lacquer work, she folded both representational and abstract geometrical patterns into the surfaces, frequently juxtaposing them on opposite sides of the same screen. The two sides of the panels form a kind of dialogue, arising out of functional necessity: a piece of wood has to be lacquered on both sides not to warp. Later she started to unfold the flat panels into folding screens. The Le Destin screen, executed in 1913, comprised four panels on which the drawing of the characters exploits the possibilities of the fold. The hand of a figure pushes against the second panel. The figure is completely absorbed by the folding panel, lost in the movement he is rendered invoking. Gray's early work with the two dimensional surface has moved into a third. It has begun to inhabit space, containing the figure that once ornamented its surface. Already it is architectural. The screen of the lobby of the apartment rue de Lota realizes the metaphorical containment of Le Destin. The wall disintegrates into panels of lacquered bricks, the skin of the structure starts to wave and desarticulate. Or we could also say that the screen progressively transformed, metamorphosed itself and became wall. At the same time it continues to occupy space like furniture, and ornament it like painting. The arts are engaged in a synthetic dialogue with the three-dimensional surface.

Throughout this early period Eileen was also designing rugs with her friend Evelyn Wyld. In 1908 they had traveled together to Morocco where they worked with Arab women in order to learn weaving and dying wool with natural colors(Adam, 62). She engages the art/industry of a French colony, articulating what might be called a bilingual state of minor linguistic habitation (Ireland/England, Morocco/France). Once again we see how Eileen is learning craft through the traditional internship and with the people. Again she is working with colors and textures, the layering of two dimensional surfaces, now on the horizontal plane. Her rug designs were less influenced by Art Nouveau than her lacquer, more strictly focused on geometrical shapes and patterns.

In 1919 she began work on the Rue de Lota apartment. Except for the exterior walls, it was a total environment, conceived over ten years before Pierre Chareau's similarly all-encompassing design at Maison de Verre. Over a period of four years, Eileen designed the lamps, rugs, furnishings and interior walls. Like the process of lacquer work, and those in which she would engage with her later houses, it was a long, painstaking process of layering, repetition, improvisation. As she moved towards architecture, she moved from inside out, from the small scale object of use.

The language within which she was building continued to inhabit itself as it shifted scales, subverting the constancy of its own walls. A dialogue was established between the scales and crafts. Language begins to delaminate itself into layers of minor and major, offering a further translation of Deleuze. "...Nous devont être bilingue même en une seule langue, nous devons avoir une langue mineure ˆ l'intérieur de notre langue, nous devons faire de notre propre langue un usage mineur. Le multi-linguisme n'est pas seulement la possession de plusieurs systèmes dont chacun serait homogènes en lui-même; c'est d'abord la ligne de fuite ou de variation qui affecte chaque système en l'empéchant d'être homogène"(Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977): 10-11). We will see later how E1027 works to delaminate the homogeneity of modern architecture.