Sydney’s west gains the largest museum in NSW history; a place to be inspired and challenged, for students to stay and an innovative collection of Australian designer pieces for sale under the Powerhouse Made banner.
Powerhouse Parramatta, with its supporting white lattice exoskeleton sitting in front of glazing, allows the eye to travel straight through to the life inside. Visually porous and welcoming, its generous spaces have been designed by Paris-based Moreau Kusunoki with Sydney practice Genton. It opened on November 7, 2026, as the largest museum in NSW history, with five exhibitions presenting more than 3,000 objects, from space flight in Task Eternal and the suburban shopping centre in The Mall to First Nations water country in Overflow, with Es Devlin’s evolving installation The Turning threaded through. Over 26,000 people registered for the free opening weekend, and it’s hard to think of a better measure of who this museum is for.
“The Powerhouse Parramatta is an extraordinary feat of architecture, curation, imagination and vision, pushing well beyond the conventional idea of what a museum should be, what it can hold and how it shares experience and knowledge,” est living editorial director Karen McCartney says. “It manages to be for everyone without ever dumbing down: an egalitarian space operating at the highest level.”
The Lang Walker Family Academy is the museum’s learning and residential wing, where students from around the country come to learn and stay in spaces with interiors by Fiona Lynch, who has given the Academy two moods: learning rooms that are pale and luminous, and sleeping quarters where colour arrives in full.
Powerhouse Made is the museum’s creative studio, which commissions Australian designers, artists and makers to respond to the collection and programs, and incubates emerging talent such as Caity Duffus, whose 3D-printed terracotta Mycelia House is among its first projects. “Our ambition is for Powerhouse Made to be a platform for collaboration and an incubator for emerging creative talent,” head of Powerhouse Made Claire Vis-Le says.
The pieces range from Tom Fereday’s crystal-glass Mazer tea lamp and reissued Sana incense holder to Jordan Fleming’s Enamora vase, Ella Saddington’s hand-forged Forget Me Not bowl for Cordon Salon, Mud Australia’s refillable candles and Maison Balzac’s take on Denise Larcombe’s 1970s Crown Crystal glassware. Tavares Strachan, Aretha Brown, Amy Wong, Olivia Bossy, Marikit Santiago, Maggie Hensel-Brown, Hattie Molloy, Fearon and Impressed Recordings bring art, objects, print and sound to the shelves.
It comes together in a store by Derlot’s Alexander Lotersztain. A large cylindrical volume of brushed stainless steel anchors the main retail space, resulting in both a functional fixture and a spatial presence.
Native planting softens the base of the lattice, so the approach to the largest museum in NSW history feels closer to a walk through a park than an arrival at an institution.
Under the broad, slender-columned roof of the ING Pavilion, planting runs to the edge of an open floor, creating a sheltered outdoor room that looks out over the city.
Es Devlin’s work sets a circle of finely drawn birds, fish and animals against the building’s lattice, so the facade becomes part of the artwork. Photography by Karen McCartney.
In the Lang Walker Family Academy, Fiona Lynch pairs a sweeping pale table with terracotta-toned stools, keeping the learning spaces calm and filled with light so that the students’ work, not the decoration, takes centre stage.
Long tables run the length of the learning rooms, with daylight drawn deep into the plan. The stools are Dowel Jones’s Recycled Simon Says stools, made in Sydney from 100 per cent recycled plastic.
Brushed stainless steel meets a sculptural stone table by denHolm, the studio of Steven John Clark, a pairing of the polished and the elemental that gives the Academy’s pale palette texture and weight without adding colour.
Floor-to-ceiling curtains in electric blue and teal and a saturated red runner turn the sleeping quarters into an experience in their own right, a world away from the beige school-camp dormitory.
denHolm, the Melbourne-based sculptural stone and furniture studio founded by Steven John Clark, fabricated custom stools and tabletops for the overnight accommodation spaces at Powerhouse Parramatta.
Deep green walls and bunks made by Fearon, dressed in blue and red, make a cocooning space to sleep in. The same colour story runs through Lynch’s Academy Collection for Waverley Mills.
Hand-painted kites by Korean kite master Bae Moosam, including the Blue and Red Danggari Kite, are limited editions made for Powerhouse Made and the Task Eternal exhibition. Their red suns and inked calligraphy are as graphic as any poster.
Fearon’s Ma stool folds sheet metal into a box, with coloured rails that work as footrests.
Hattie Molloy’s hammered metal vessels, including the Allium vase in a Powerhouse edition, catch the light like beaten silver.
Olivia Bossy’s Front Door Friend III, a functional wall sculpture, gives keys and glasses a ledge and a bag a hook—a small piece of art that does a daily job.
Tom Fereday’s Mazer tea lamp, an amber crystal-glass exclusive, sits with Maison Balzac’s Le Verre wine glass, which revisits Denise Larcombe’s 1970s design for Crown Crystal.