Lyon Housemuseum

Architect Corbett Lyon designed his own family home in Kew as a working museum, folding gallery walls, storage and living space into a single building so that art and domestic life share the same rooms rather than being kept apart. He and his wife Yueji opened it as a public museum, then in 2018 added a freestanding gallery building next door, and in 2024 folded both into one integrated institution housing the Lyon Collection — paintings, sculpture, video and photography by more than sixty contemporary Australian artists. The original house is shown only on pre-booked tour days, led by members of the Lyon family themselves, who talk through works installed exactly where the family once lived with them; the newer galleries next door run a changing public exhibition program Thursday to Sunday. A 2010 survey of private museum architecture worldwide named the building one of the ten most exciting of its kind. It remains, unusually, both a home and a public collection at once — the tension between the two is the point, not an inconvenience to be designed away.