Potts Point Apartment by Anthony Gill Architects.

Image: Peter Bennetts

Sydney Living Museums is holding a series of fascinating talks over eight Thursday nights from 12 September to 31 October 2013 at the Mint. The series is entitled Open Talks: Rooms in the House and brings together architects, historians and social commentators to explore and discuss how the design, use and relationship of different rooms in the home have changed over time – from the demise of formal living rooms to the changing nature of kitchens and bathrooms – and what these changes say about us as people and societies.

Joanna Nicholas, portfolio curator.

Joanna Nicholas (Sydney Living Museums) will focus on Australian bedrooms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how they reflect changing tastes and fashions, and reveal aspects of class, personality, creativity, ingenuity, comfort, privacy, and even love and lust. Today, bedrooms regularly appear in the media and have become semi-public spaces but in the nineteenth century, the bedroom was the most private and personal expression of domestic interiors. Australians derived inspiration from overseas styles and attempted to adapt them to the local social conditions and climate – from the straw, horsehair, feather mattress combination of a nineteenth-century four-post bed strewn with a Marcella bedcover and possum-skin rug to a 1950s coconut fibre, cotton and wire spring Sleepmaker mattress on a simple wooden box-frame resplendent with acrylic fake fur bedspread. Approaches to furnishing bedrooms also reflected attitudes to pests, health and sanitation.

Koichi Takada, architect.

Koichi Takada (Koichi Takada Architects) will discuss how we can redefine the use of our bedrooms and find a new approach to their design, given the demands of our contemporary lifestyles. The bedroom is becoming more and more multi-functional. It is said we spend one-third of our lives in our bedrooms and, thanks to our love of mobile technology, we spend increasingly more time there studying, working and entertaining ourselves. In Sydney, soaring property prices and high rents push us to rethink and redesign smaller apartments in a more efficient fashion. We are challenged to create flexible spaces that connect to other rooms – making small apartments feel more spacious, and blurring the boundaries between living rooms and bedrooms. We can also learn from the traditional Japanese concept of tatami rooms, where a room can be transformed for a different purpose during the day. Our bedrooms can become more versatile in use, with flexibility in planning to control levels of privacy.

10 October 2013
6.30–8.00 pm
The Mint
Bookings essential.
$30 general, $25 concession/members
Information & bookings