Visit Melbourne’s newest art gallery
26 Mar 2019
Architect Corbett Lyon wanted to push the boundaries between a private home and a public art gallery, and his Lyon Housemuseum has proven a resounding success.
The Lyon family sits at a dinner table completely surrounded by a Howard Arkley mural; a daunting sculpture by Patricia Piccinini, The Carrier, looms in their hallway; and an amorphous Christopher Langton sculpture dominates the backyard.
Corbett Lyon’s home, in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, is a mind-blowing experiment in what is a house and what is an art gallery. It features a collection of 350 works by over 50 Australian artists – many original commissions.
And the public can, at appointed times, simply wander through their entire home.
High concept
“The house was a very new experiment to juxtapose two very different concepts, a residential space with a public gallery space under the one roof,” says Yueji Lyon, Corbett’s wife and partner in the pioneering idea. “Many house museums have a separation – the front and the back, or the upstairs and downstairs – so we went the extra mile and, very crazily, mixed it completely. People who come to visit us can walk every inch of the house, except our girls’ very messy bedrooms.”
The family’s history helps form the DNA of the building with text flowing across the ceiling. The words are like a family diary with Corbett giving his wife and two daughters a week to write down anything they could think of on pieces of paper – places they have visited, recipes, family mottoes and the girls’ best friends.
The home is a based on a cubic design with a white cube to focus on the collection and a black cube for video art (which also made an excellent sleepover space for the girls when they were younger). Not one for understatement, Corbett even included a huge, custom-designed organ as part of one of the living spaces. It is not for show either – the architect is a keen organist and will often play if he is leading the private tour.
New space
Now the Lyon family are making the shift from private to public with the launch in March of the adjoining Lyon Housemuseum Galleries. Corbett purchased the land next door to his home and set about creating a $14.5 million art museum that he then turned over to the government. The museum’s first exhibition, Enter, will feature 16 artists from the Lyon collection – including Brooke Andrew, Shaun Gladwell and Piccinini – producing brand new commissions.
Taking a similarly bold approach to creating the building, Corbett Lyon also commissioned artist Reko Rennie to produce Visible, Invisible, a work that was painted on the foundations of the new building, and then the building was built on top of it, with just a sliver of the original work visible hinting at the huge canvas that has since been buried.
For more information, visit the Lyon Housemuseum.
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