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Home furnishing

J. Ratner & Co. Pty Ltd., furniture manufacturers, Newtown (NSW): Furniture design drawings, photographs, order book, Ratner family architectural plans [archive]

Original designs for furnishings

Furniture, furnishing textiles, wallpaper, leadlight windows, stained glass and painted decoration designs

Walford, 7 Knox Street, Double Bay, December 1967 [photographer unknown]

Leslie Walford Archive

For nearly 50 years Leslie Walford AM (1927–2012) was one of Sydney’s most successful interior designers, the decorator of choice for the city’s social elite and a leading figure in the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA).

The interior design profession in Sydney

The professional practice of interior design took shape over the 20th century. It became formalised through professional associations and the expectation that decorators be trained in design principles

Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co. : merchants and general importers of British, Continental and American merchandise, Clarence and Barrack Streets, Sydney. On sale: American chairs, American hardware, Austrian furniture, bedsteads, books, cigarettes, cigars, clocks, cricketing and other sporting goods, crockery, cutlery, firerarms, furniture, glassware, ironmongery, jewellery, leather goods, musical instruments, optical goods, organs, Palmer's vestas, patent medicines, perfumery, pianos, plated ware, saddlery, stationery, tobacconists' goods, tobaccos, toys, watches, fancy goods of every description [trade catalogue]
Department stores

Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co

Feldheim, Gotthelf & Co’s new warehouse invited Sydney shoppers to step into a world assembled from every reach of the global trade routes that furnished the late-Victorian home

Design for a cabinet

The Paul Kafka (Vienna) Archive

The collection consists of over 700 furniture design drawings by various Central European designers dating from between about 1920 and 1939. It originates from Vienna, Austria, where Paul Kafka worked for his father’s furniture business before emigrating to Australia

Equestrian Statue of the King, Astor Flats and Chief Secretary’s Building

The Astor, 1923–2023

Upon completion in 1923, The Astor in Sydney's Macquarie Stree twas the largest reinforced concrete building in Australia, the tallest residential block, and this country’s first company title residences

Detail of the four poster bed and beaded watch pockets in the Principal bedroom, Vaucluse House

Watch pockets

Watch pockets hung on the head cloth of a four-post bedstead and originally served in place of bedside tables, which were uncommon in the 19th century

Acquisition of the John and Phyllis Murphy wallpaper collection
Wallpaper

Wall to wall: a marvellous wallpaper collection

A remarkable donation of over 3,000 wallpaper samples by John and Phyllis Murphy adds to our existing collection to form Australia’s largest repository of historic wallpapers

Two women on the steps of a sandstone building. One is crouching and holding a wooden tool, an axe rests beside her. The other and one sits on the step at a easel, under an umbrella

Queering the Interior: London, New York, Sydney, 1882–1929

Design practices of five figures from queer history: Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, American actress and interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, and Australian artists Eirene Mort, Roy de Maistre and Adrian Feint (1894–1971)