No Design Week? No Worries. Hōlus-bōlus Blurs Art and Design in a Sydney Loft.

Sydney, for all its talent, still has no dedicated citywide design week of its own, which leaves its design community looking for an audience elsewhere. Each September, a good share of it finds its way to Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks.

As part of the fair’s Offsite program for its 10th edition this year, curators Emma Elizabeth and Cassandra Bird led a slice of that crowd to Surry Hills. Hōlus-bōlus—an old term for “all at once” or “all in one lump”—brought contemporary art, collectible design, furniture, lighting, objects and fashion together inside a private loft residence, for one week only. As Elizabeth puts it: “Not a gallery. Not a home. Something in between.”

The setting does the heavy lifting. The Second is a whole-floor loft converted by Iain Halliday of BKH within the century-old Edwards & Co. Ltd Tea Merchants building, once home to a well-known photography studio. Owned by Bronwyn Bailey, a former client of Elizabeth’s, the apartment is offered to select artists, designers and curators through a philanthropic residency program. Five-metre ceilings, timber floors and floor-to-ceiling windows give the rooms their character, and rather than neutralising all that into a white-cube backdrop, the curators let the proportions, thresholds and spring light decide where things went. Works turned up around corners, beside windows and among furniture, shifting as the sun crossed the rooms through the day.

The bolder move was refusing to label anything. Bird brought her relationships with contemporary artists and the gallery world; Elizabeth brought two decades working across interiors, styling, exhibitions and spatial storytelling. Instead of splitting the apartment into art rooms and design rooms, the pair arranged pieces by material, colour, scale and silhouette. Some pairings were planned. Others only revealed themselves once the work arrived in the building. Elizabeth’s aim was simple—get visitors looking before they started categorising—and by her account, the best moments came when the line between art and design disappeared altogether.

The roll call runs to 40 participating Australian and New Zealand practices spanning designers and makers such as Adam Goodrum, Jon Goulder, Tom Fereday and Ross Gardam, through to artists including Janet Laurence, Tina Havelock Stevens and Kate Banazi.

Until Sydney has a design week to call its own, the smartest play may be the one Elizabeth and Bird made: work within the art fair’s own program, and give design a room of its own. Or, in this case, a whole floor.

That floor held work from 40 Australian and New Zealand practices across art and design: ACV Studio, Adam Cornish, Adam Goodrum, A-Esque, Annalisa Ferraris, Ash Allen, Ben McCarthy, Bernabei Freeman, Charles Wilson / Andrew Simpson, Clementine Blackman, Danielle Brustman, Dean Norton, Donna Marcus, Edward Linacre, Elliot Bastion, Emma Elizabeth, Gene A’Hern, Janos Korban & Stefanie Flaubert, Janet Laurence, Jedda-Daisy Culley, Jon Goulder, Josee Vesely-Manning, Juanita McLaughlan, Kate Banazi, Lightly, Luke Storrier, Lydia Pearson, Nau, Patrick Scott / NewInstance(), Oko Olo Studio, Paul Davies, Rina Bernabei, Ross Gardam, Samuel Hodge, Sarah Ellison, Shilo Engelbrecht, Snelling Studio, Tina Havelock Stevens, Tom Fereday and Tom Skeehan.

[Photography by Nicholas Caldwell.]