Olga Gémes was born in Budapest, then Austria-Hungary, on the 26 June 1905 and studied architecture in several European cities, including Vienna, Paris and Dresden, completing her degree at the Berlin Technische Hochschule under the tuition of Hans Poelzig. After graduation she worked in Paris, including as part of the architecture staff in the Galeries Lafayette department store. She also worked with her sister, Elisabeth (Erzsébet), an interior designer, on several projects such as the conversion of a country house. The pair also entered competitions together.

 

By the early 1930s, Gémes had moved to England and undertook work as a textile designer. In 1939 she was living in Croydon with her husband Elemer Forbát (also Füchsl). She took up a post in the 1940s at the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Oxford. In 1946 she exhibited her work at the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition (V&A). Gémes was naturalised as a British citizen with her husband in 1947. She appears in a list of Leading British Textile Designers in the book Textile by Britain of 1948. In the 1950s she became a lecturer at the Leicester School of Architecture then at Leicester Art College. She was a member of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers and of the Central Institute of Art and Design. In her later working life she also became a freelance photographer. Gémes Ford died in London on the 5 September 1988. 

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