ADR brings you virtual visits of the Melbourne Design Week events that didn’t get their day in the sun. 

The health and wellbeing of clients, staff and visitors have been the priorities of interior designers, architects and event planners as COVID-19 has taken a grip on our mobility.

Alongside cancellations of major design events, interior design showrooms have moved to appointment-only openings and have been innovating on traditional in-person sales. much anticipated 2020 Melbourne Design Week kicked off on the 12 March but soon after events were cancelled or postponed and the festival’s hub the NGV, closed to the public due to the pandemic’s rapid escalation with the festival’s

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented ways to celebrate creativity. ADR’s virtual visits to our favourite Melbourne Design Week events will make you feel that you’re in these spaces and with these objects from your own home. 

Design Unwind by Arthur G, Byzantine Design and TSAR Carpets

Design Unwind is a collaborative pop-up installation space by Australian interior leaders Arthur G, Byzantine Design and TSAR Carpets. Guided by the 2020 Melbourne Design Week theme ‘How design can shape and improve life?’, the three brands showcased their products in tactile and sensory ways to create an immersive space. 

The companies were motivated by the principles of biophilic design: a design philosophy that focuses on humankind’s innate biological connection to nature and its restorative potential. The furniture created for the meditative space was manufactured in Australia, using Victorian Ash and locally made foams, with the intention to communicate that well being is more than what simply can be seen.

Designworks 04 at Sophie Gannon Gallery

In the fourth instalment of the Designworks exhibition, gallerist Sophie Gannon teamed up with designers Danielle Brustman, Dale Hardiman and Stephen Royce to explore the relationship between colour, materiality and scale.  

The Chromatic Fantastic series by Brustman is a collection of modular furniture pieces that play with the potential of colour combinations to evoke harmony or discord. She approached the colour selections as compositions of chords, with the resulting collection a vivid cacophony of room jewellery, wall lights and record cabinets. 

For their ‘Open Garden’ series, Hardiman and Royce used 200 LCD mobile phones to create eerie lighting sculptures. By reanimating the discarded technology, the pair expose our disassociation from our device’s materiality, despite their ubiquity. 

Exquisite Corpse / Cadavre Exquis by A&A at Tolarno Galleries Melbourne 

A perfect marriage of traditional craftsmanship and design innovation, A&A is a joint venture between French artisan Arthur Seigneur and Sydney-based industrial designer Adam Goodrum. One of twenty-five trained straw marquetry practitioners in the world, Seigneur decorates Goordum’s geometric cabinetry pieces with painstakingly intricate kaleidoscopic designs.

For A&A’s debut with Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries, the duo produced three unique pieces of furniture. Talleo, a tallboy, Archant, a console, and Longbow, a credenza, were designed by Goodrum and graphically decorated by Seigneur in richly coloured geometric patterns that maximise the straw marquetry’s dazzling visual effect. 

Stay tuned for more virtual visits of showrooms and events.