Search our website and collections

Go direct to State Archives online indexesGo direct to State Archives catalogue

Popular searches

Museum of SydneyFirst FleetConvictsProbateShipping lists

Home furnishing

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)

Chenille curtain sunburst design

Furnishing textiles in Australia: 1850-1920

The Caroline Simpson Library holds numerous examples of textile furnishings provenanced to NSW homes dating back to the 1850s

Window seat, c1840

Designed with intent: colonial vs modernist chairs

This selection of furniture juxtaposes the old with the new: early 19th-century colonial seating and modernist styles made over a hundred years later

The home beautiful / by Mark Foys Ltd. [trade catalogue]
Department stores

Sydney’s department stores and furniture emporia, 1890-1960

This online exhibition has been inspired by the trade literature from Sydney’s furniture and furnishing retailers, with all the illustrations sourced from the Caroline Simpson Collection