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Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Thank you to Kate Scott from The Australian Ballet for pulling together this week's excellent Designing Dance guest blog!! DON'T FORGET to leave a comment on any of this week's guest blog posts to be in the running to win a double pass to Madame Butterfly AND a Chip Chop ‘Pavlova’ tote! - Jenny x
If fashion is the last repository of the marvellous, as Christian Dior once declared, costume archives might just be the last repository of the sublime.
For almost 50 years The Australian Ballet has been creating costumes and, like dancers, they need somewhere to rest between shows. That somewhere, since the 80s, has been a hundred-year-old wool store in Kensington, a space that exudes an almost magical air and exerts a magnetic pull over its visitors.
Productions are stored with library precision by the store’s redoubtable Barbara Langley, but everywhere there’s something unexpected to surprise and delight. A handpainted ballet plate in the apple-green kitchen; bright yellow character shoes waiting to dance off a shelf; a simple shrine to ballet great Margot Fonteyn; a leather codpiece lying suggestively on a table; a storey-tall white tutu billowing from the rafters.
It’s a place we’ve returned to time and time again for photo shoots, despite the store’s charming and not-so-charming impracticalities (no lifts to move costumes between floors; no heating in the winter). On the recent Madame Butterfly and Merry Widow shoots, the dancers had to be bundled into coats, scarves and slippers between takes as frost formed on the portable furnace, but no photography studio can match its ambience.
It’s a place that makes adults exclaim with childlike delight; a dress-up box of epic proportions where the trinkets are designed by some of theatre’s greats. The very quotable Mr. Dior keenly observed “the designer is the last possessor of the wand of Cinderella's fairy godmother”. Perhaps that’s what makes this humble store a castle.
PS. For more photos of the store do visit The Australian Ballet Blog, Behind Ballet
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