Melbourne Design Week highlights

Melbourne Design Week is now in full swing with a host of exhibitions, workshops and gatherings to partake of. The National Gallery of Victoria launched its ninth edition of Melbourne Design on 14 May, 2025 with events running until 25 May.

MDW is Australia’s largest design event and presents a feast of boundary-pushing work within 350+ events, exhibitions, talks, and installations. Melbourne Design Week celebrates the depth and richness of design talent in the region from a new crop of emerging talent to the industry’s most well-respected and established professionals.

Here’s a selection of events which may interest woodworkers in particular.

Installation view of 100 Lights presented by Friends & Associates. Photo: Sean Fennessy

100 Lights exhibition

Staged by Friends & Associates, 100 Lights played host to the launch of Melbourne Design Week, illuminating North Melbourne’s sweeping Meat Market Stables in a visually spectacular display of lighting designs by 110 artists, designers, and makers. Visitors are immersed in a glowing environment replete with lamps, pendants and sconces made by emerging to late career practitioners including Adam Goodrum, Ross Gardam, Tantri Mustika, Marlo Lyda, Jay Jermyn and many more.

Goodbye London Plane

Goodbye London Plane presented by Ma House Supply Store celebrates Melbourne’s shady streetside London plane tree plantings. Often maligned, these trees are blamed for triggering allergic reactions and blanketing city streets. Their roots can be hazardous with limbs that obstruct powerlines and other infrastructure. After years of studies and complaints, most of Melbourne’s London plane trees will be removed under a long-term City of Melbourne Council plan.

A group exhibition led by Wood Review Maker of the Year 2024 Andy Ward and curated by Ben Mooney showcases the work of makers and hopes to spark conversation and invite a second look at part of Melbourne’s urban fabric, history and identity.

Trent Jansen with Johnny Nargoodah. Photo: Romellp Pereira

Trent Jansen: Two Decades of Design Anthropology

Marking 20 years of practice will be one of Australia's most accomplished designers Trent Jansen who will present an exhibition titled Trent Jansen: Two Decades of Design Anthropology. The exhibition will traverse his early works repurposing road signs into stools to his groundbreaking collaborations with First Nations makers such as designers Johnny Nargoodah, Errol Evans and Tanya Singer, and artist Maree Clark.

Anton Gerner, Burr Walnut Egg Chest burr walnut, celery top pine,plywood, aged brass. Photo: Andrew Curtis

The Storm, The Craft And The Future: The Anton Gerner Exhibition II

This is the maker’s latest exhibition of works which is currently staged at Labassa, the National Trust’s Victorian-era mansion. Ten new works challenge perceptions of contemporary design while engaging in a dialogue with history, craftsmanship, and materiality.

Anton Gerner, The Vector Collection: Three Cabinets Exploring Form and Contrast, fiddleback ash, ebonised, fiddleback ash, huon pine, aged brass. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Monterey Pine, John Gollings

Knot Pine

Until 2019, a 25-metre-tall heritage-listed Monterey pine stood before the Walsh Street residence that architect, writer and cultural critic Robin Boyd (1919–71) designed in 1957. The tree died, and the Robin Boyd Foundation’s supply of felled timber provides an opportunity to consider its second life.

The community admired the tree when living; now milled, pine is commonly viewed as a cheap and ugly material unsuitable for fine craftsmanship. Embracing pine’s democratic role in 20th-century industrial history, the Foundation commissioned furniture maker Alexsandra Pontonio to design a seated solution for the timber supply.

Tout le Cochon presented by Michael Minghi Park

Farm to table. Forest to architecture. How can designers and architects embrace hyper-local materials? Melbourne School of Design has developed Urban Arborist – a model for sourcing and utilising urban timbers through collaboration with arborists, designers, and fabricators. This approach transforms locally harvested trees into low-carbon construction materials, celebrating timber in its raw, non-standard form.

Tout le Cochon – French for ‘the whole pig’ – reflects this ethos. The exhibition showcases a kitchen pass designed and fabricated from a single sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) harvested in Melbourne. Hosted at Arnold’s, a wine bar and restaurant in Kensington, the exhibition invited designers and makers to rethink their approach to materials.

Michael Minghi Park, Slow Table. Photo: Mitchell Ransome

Future Ambition

Future Amibition is an exhibition featuring seven artists, designers and makers in Craft’s Main Gallery: Isabel Avendano-Hazbun, DNJ Paper, Other Matter pty ltd, Pit Projects and Shahn Stewart. The exhibition showcases innovative and ambitious works by artists and makers investing in new pathways forward – presenting creative and conscious furniture, lighting, artworks and installations – with the hope for a better tomorrow.

The development of sustainable art, craft and design creates specialised knowledge and skills that are highly valued in the commercial world. This exhibition examines the unrealised potential of this creative intellectual property and highlights ways artists can achieve positive real-world outcomes as they invest boldly in our collective future.

Isabel Avendaño Hazbún. Photo: Claire Armstrong, courtesy of Craft Victoria

Isabel Avendaño Hazbún, bench Future Amibition Photo: Matthew McQuiggan

Offcuts

Offcuts is an exhibition of sculptural art and furniture pieces by Garrett Lark and Alex Lark primarily made of the oak offcuts generated from the studio. Informed by the discarded material, the pieces celebrate the organic nature of matter and the playful reimagining of structures.

Made Studio, Offcuts, shot on location at Made Studio’s workshop in Brunswick, 175 Rose St, Fitzroy. Photo: Alex Lark

The above selection is by no means exhaustive – check out the full program available via the Melbourne Design Week website: designweek.melbourne

Images supplied courtesy National Gallery Victoria

Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria. It takes place 15 – 25 May 2025 at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne and at various locations throughout metropolitan and regional Victoria.