Melbourne Design Week Award

Jon Goulder is a fourth-generation Australian furniture designer and maker, born in Bowral, NSW and now based in Adelaide. Continuing a family legacy of refined, hand-made furniture, including seating, surfaces, cabinetry, lighting, textiles and objects, his practice is grounded in longevity, craft and material intelligence, with works designed to be lived with and passed down. For Melbourne Design Week 2026, Goulder presents new work at Chapter House in partnership with Alpha 60, including a monumental long table with architect Henry Williams, the Pavilion Chair developed for Yiaga with Wardle, and collaborative lighting and seating with Andrew Carvolth. His Festival Chair also features in 100 Chairs at Abbotsford Convent.

Volker Haug Studio is a Melbourne-based decorative lighting practice known for its elegant, playful, and finely crafted designs. With a team of skilled designers and makers, the studio creates made-to-order, customisable lighting that balances simplicity, individuality, and longevity. For Melbourne Design Week 2025, Volker Haug Studio marked its twentieth anniversary with a three-day exhibition celebrating its distinct design language. Featuring works loaned from private collections, the retrospective traced the studio’s evolution — from early pieces to recent innovations — highlighting its commitment to craftsmanship, experimentation, and material exploration.

Adam and Arthur (A&A) are acclaimed for their significant contributions to Melbourne Design Week and the Australian design industry. Adam’s designs, enhanced by Arthur’s mastery of straw marquetry – a technique from the 1600s using premium rye straw from Burgundy, France – feature unique patterned veneer surfaces. For Melbourne Design Week 2024, A&A introduced their most ambitious work, The Kissing Cabinet, at Tolarno Galleries. This piece reflects their interest in mechanical furniture, made popular in the 1800s, which integrated design, engineering, and craftsmanship in items like cabinets and desks with hidden compartments. A new work has since been commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Paula Savage is a senior Mualgal artist from Moa Island in the Torres Strait renowned for her ability to bring to life the enduring traditional material practices of her cultural heritage. Savage presented three extraordinary works – Dollar Reef, No 3 Reef and No 2 Reef – at the Melbourne Design Fair as part of the FOCUS exhibition, which brought to attention the skills and conceptual prowess of five accomplished Australian female designers. Through these works, Savage shares stories of her home in the Kubin community on Moa Island and the reefs off the coast of Lag Mua. The three works were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Revival Projects received the MDW Award for its exhibition Zero Footprint Repurposing. Led by Robbie Neville, the innovative building company established one of the world’s first free repurposing hubs during the festival. Located in Collingwood, the hub offers the design and construction industry a space to store salvaged demolition materials for reuse, giving them a second life instead of sending them to landfill. Since its debut during the festival, the hub has expanded its impact by creating Australia’s only inner-city timber mill at the same site.

The exhibition A New Normal exhibited fifteen ideas by Melbourne’s leading architects and designers to transform Greater Melbourne into a self-sufficient city by 2030. Following the success of the Melbourne exhibition, the A New Normal project has been developed for Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Guadalajara, and nine of the Melbourne projects have moved beyond speculation and are now progressing toward real-world implementation.

Georgia Nowak and Eugene Perepletchikov won the inaugural Mercedes Benz Design Week award in 2020 for their work Aurum, which explored their complex relationship with gold through the medium of film. This film was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and was exhibited at Sampling the Future at NGV Australia in 2021-2022.