Former Foster + Partners illustrator Emily Soley paints Melbourne’s pubs and shopfronts as portraits of memory and neighbourhood attachment.

Emily Soley spent years documenting buildings for their function, first as a spatial design student at Central Saint Martins in London and then as an architectural illustrator at the international practice Foster + Partners. Her debut solo exhibition, A Love Letter to the Inner North, opens at Smith Street gift store and gallery Dear Neighbour on Friday 2 October, presenting an original collection of hand-painted watercolours capturing the pubs, cafés, bakeries and wine bars that locals have grown attached to.

Soley is the artist behind Draw My Home, a practice that began as house portraits sketched to fund her studies and has since grown into a wider celebration of the buildings that shape Melbourne’s neighbourhoods. Now based in the inner north, where she lives and works, her paintings have built her a following of more than 13,000 on Instagram, drawn to her ability to capture both the architecture of a place and its atmosphere.

An emotional way of looking at architecture

Training as a spatial designer has not loosened Soley’s eye for the details that make a building legible, and she still notices proportion, material and signage in a drawing that remains architecturally accurate throughout. What has shifted is what she values about those details once she has noticed them.

“When I worked in architecture, so much of the focus was naturally on how a building functioned, how it was designed and how people would experience it,” Soley says. “Now I’m much more interested in what happens to a building once people have lived with it for years, the layers that get added that were never part of an architect’s original intention.”

Bar Liberty, where the new owners simply spray painted their name over the previous signage, is one such example. Soley calls the gesture tongue in cheek and distinctly Melbourne. These additions rarely carry architectural significance in the traditional sense, yet they are often what gives a place its personality, and Soley describes the result as a more emotional way of looking at architecture altogether.

Painting as both outsider and local

Having moved to Melbourne from a small English village a decade ago, Soley approaches the city’s pubs, milk bars and corner shops with a perspective that combines an outsider’s curiosity with a local’s accumulated memory. The pubs in particular fascinated her early on, since their architecture differs so completely from the traditional English pubs of her childhood, even as what happens inside them – the birthdays, the trivia nights, the Friday evenings – stays remarkably similar.

“I’ve lived in Melbourne for around 10 years now, so I guess it doesn’t feel like an adopted city in quite the same way anymore,” Soley says. “I suppose I’m painting them with a mixture of an outsider’s eye and a local’s attachment.”

Sharing a finished painting often draws out a viewer’s own story about the building depicted, and Soley finds it compelling that a single structure can hold entirely different meanings for different people at once.

A record of what disappears

Given how often venues in the inner north close or change hands, an element of preservation runs through the exhibition, though Soley says she did not fully recognise this until well into the project. Some of her most meaningful commissions have been for places that no longer exist or are about to change – when someone asks her to paint a shop their parents once owned or a house before its demolition, turning the artwork into a record of something no longer physically accessible. Soley is careful, however, not to let the work tip into mourning, and frames it instead as an act of noticing and celebrating these places while they remain. 

“A building may change hands, change completely or eventually disappear, but the memories we associate with it don’t disappear with it. I think that’s really what I’m trying to capture, not just what these places look like, but what they come to mean to us.”

A Love Letter to the Inner North runs from 2 October to 2 November 2026 at Dear Neighbour, 311 Smith Street, with an opening night on Friday 2 October from 6pm to 9pm.

Images: Supplied by Bria Rechner PR.