American designer and writer Elizabeth Eyre, better known as Eyre de Lanux was BOTD in 1894. Born into a prominent family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, she studied art at the Art Students’ League in New York, exhibiting two paintings in the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. In 1918, she married the French writer and diplomat Pierre Combret de Lanux. After World War One, they moved to Paris, establishing themselves among the artistic avant-garde and befriending Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, James Joyce and Man Ray, who took several portraits of her. Eyre and de Lanux were bisexual and had an open marriage, allowing each of them to pursue affairs with others. Her lovers included society hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, the artist Romaine Brooks (who painted her portrait under the title Huntress), Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Louis Aragon. In the 1920s, Eyre studied at the Académie Ranson alongside Tamara de Łempicka and Gino Severini, before enrolling at the Académie Colarossi. In 1926, she began an affair with English designer Evelyn Wyld, forming a long personal and professional partnership. At the 1928 Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, they exhibited Art Deco-inspired geometric rugs, designed by Eyre and realised by Wyld, and Eyre’s furniture, created by the Chanaux company. Eyre and Wyld opened an interior design studio in Paris, decorating apartments and houses for celebrity clients in France and Tunisia. Her designs were notable for her use of innovative materials, including sand-blasted glass, lacquer, cork, amber and linoleum. After the global economic crash of 1929, they moved to Cannes, establishing Décor, a boutique furniture gallery. Their last professional assignment, the fitting out of the Le Pavillon Bleu bar in Cannes, was completed in 1932, before closing their business in 1933. Eyre fell into obscurity, returning to America after her husband’s death in 1955, and writing for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s. In her later years, she wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books. She died in a nursing home in New York in 1996, aged 102.

She died in 1996, aged 102.