In Paris in November 1972 the contents of Jacques Doucet’s apartment were put up for sale. Among the art collector’s possessions was a red lacquer screen that sold for more than $36,000, an unprecedented amount for a decorative art piece by a relatively unknown designer.

That little-known artificer was Eileen Gray, and she had created the Le Destin screen almost 60 years previously. Growing up near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, her early sensitivity to design was marked when her family home was converted from a plain manor house into an ostentatious Elizabethan-style Victorian pile.

Nearly 80 years later, she wrote: “As a child I loved the old Irish house, but that was pulled down and a horrible brick structure built in its place, so I went to live in France.”

The high price achieved by Le Destin signalled the start of the rediscovery of Gray. Those who sought her out did not have far to look: she was in her apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte, in the 6th arrondissement, and still hard at work at the age of 94.

A flurry of newspaper articles followed the sensational Doucet sale, and in the coming years Gray received critical praise and official honours. Strangely, given that the screen drew attention to her, the belated recognition was not for her luxurious early work in lacquer, but her later modernist furniture and architecture.

She became commercially viable, too. In 1973, Zeev Aram negotiated licensing rights to a number of Gray’s designs, and she lived long enough to see some of her furniture put into production, half a century after it was designed.

Gray is now firmly set in the canon of design and architectural history. Interest in her is such that not only does the National Museum of Ireland have a permanent showcase of her work, but during this year’s London Design festival two exhibitions were dedicated to her.

One was at Aram’s showrooms and was little more than a commercial promotion. The other is at the Design Museum and indicates that there is still more to be learnt about this enigmatic designer.

Gray was awkward to categorise, which is why it took so long for her to be recognised. That much is apparent from the bare biographical bones: as a female Anglo-Scots-Irish amateur, she does not fit the typical mould of leading 20th-century designers.

But she was also an awkward character. Reticent to the point of reclusive, she lacked the impetus to develop the personal myths vital to the cult of individual architects. When critical acceptance came in 1973 in the form of an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, she declined to attend the opening, preferring to view the exhibition in private.

Her work was similarly awkward. It never quite fitted a neat narrative of contemporary design. Earlier pieces such as the Doucet screen, being both luxurious and modern, appear typical of art deco, yet Gray was working in that idiom years before art deco had its heyday in the mid-1920s.

When she turned her back on such youthful exoticism, it was to embrace the strictures of modernism. Gray, however, did not fit comfortably into the movement. A guiding tenet of modernism was an almost utopian belief in the power of technology, often resulting in a crude celebration of the machine. The tag of functionalism, for example, was applied to chairs that looked technically advanced, though came with no guarantee of functional comfort.

Gray was not easily co-opted, and while her work looks utterly modern, her aesthetic was dedicated to the physical and psychological comfort of the user.