Melbourne Design Week
Melbourne Design Week is back for 2025 — and it's bringing glowing galleries, sensory furniture and even designer basketball to locations statewide.
Overview
Melbourne Design Week is back for 2025, and for its ninth edition, the city's biggest celebration of design and design thinking will be bringing over 350 events to locations statewide. Taking place between Thursday, May 15–Sunday, May 25, the event will present both high-concept ideas and hands-on experiences across architecture, lighting, furniture, publishing, sport and beyond. Most events are free to enter — meaning that whether you're a design die-hard or just keen for something interesting to do on the weekend, you'll have the opportunity to explore the city in a whole new way.
Highlights include 100 Lights, which will see North Melbourne's Meat Market Stables be transformed into a glowing gallery of contemporary lighting by 100 artists and makers, with table lamps, pendants and wall lights that showcase both function and cutting-edge form.
Image: Sibling Architecture
Another fascinating display is Sibling Architecture's Deep Calm, a thought-provoking exhibition that explores how design can support neurodivergent people with a soothing showcase of weighted sofas and tactile rugs. Elsewhere, the Boyd Baker House in Bacchus Marsh will host A New Normal, which presents ideas by 12 Melbourne architects that aim to make the city self-sufficient by 2030. The program also includes must-see retrospectives by two legends of Australian design: lighting designer Volker Haug and furniture designer Trent Jansen, who are both marking 20 years in the game.
Melbourne Design Week 2025 also features exhibitions exploring the sustainable reuse of timber from urban trees, typography shows, memorial-making workshops, curated book pop-ups, and, as part of Open House Melbourne, a two-day symposium that delves into the architecture, places, issues and practices associated with the end of life. Meanwhile, the NGV will be the focal point of Melbourne Art Book Fair, with over 100 publishers setting up in the Great Hall with a special focus on Southeast Asian designers. There'll also be free kids' storytime sessions led by local children's book authors under Yayoi Kusama's towering Dancing Pumpkin sculpture in Federation Court.
Volker Haug, Fire Trees
And if you've ever wanted to shoot hoops with a furniture designer, you're in luck — this year's program includes a two-on-two basketball tournament for designers and design enthusiasts at a Reko Rennie-painted court in Cremorne.
Peter Bennetts, March Studio x Reko Rennie
Top image: Alex Lark.
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