100 Chairs exhibition at Melbourne Design Week 2026 – Photo Tom Ross.

Design. With Melbourne Design Week 2026 now wrapped up, Archipanic design contributor Julie Harrington picks ten highlights from the tenth edition of Australia’s largest design festival — a year in which makers pushed into the raw origins of cast glass and experimented with materials ranging from leather and waste wood to stainless steel.

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Felled exhibition – Photo by C. Armstrong.

Curated by Friends & Associates, the 100 CHAIRS exhibition brought together work from over 100 Australian studios, artists, architects, and practices, offering a platform for creatives at every stage of their careers to present work that is both designed and made on home soil. The range was pleasingly wide: highlights included a chaise lounge produced via robotic 3D printing from 100 per cent recycled material, alongside an inflatable chair conceived with camping trips in mind.

100 Chairs exhibition – Photo Tom Ross.

From the pop of a cork to the cascade of bubbles, champagne has long marked life’s better moments. For A Sense of Occasion, THOMAS MAXAM Studio invited designers to translate a personal celebration into a joyful champagne bucket — one of Melbourne Design Week 2026’s more disarming briefs. As a concept, it’s a useful reminder of what the festival does well: not every design needs to solve a problem. Sometimes it simply raises a smile — or, in this case, a glass.

Thomas Maxam’s A Sense of Occasion exhibition – Photo by Matthew McQuiggan.

At the Tactile Dialogues: Fragments of Matter exhibition, experimental designer Jessie French and Melbourne furniture studio Made by Morgen launched MarbleWood, a marbled surface material derived from an algae-based polymer. Each piece was hand-poured directly onto a timber substrate in French’s Melbourne studio, then coloured using locally milled pigments sourced from materials company Langridge. The result is a surface that feels as considered in its making as it does in its appearance.

MarbleWood by OTHER MATTER’s Jessie French x Made by Morgan – Photo via IG, follow @frenchjessie.

At Abbotsford Convent, Sydney-based furniture and product designer Tom Fereday presented Arum — named from the Latin for sand — a series of sculptural lighting pieces marking the launch of his sand-cast glass objects, developed with artisans from Canberra Glassworks. Melting glass in sand moulds leaves traces of the process on the finished surface, adding a tactile texture that speaks directly to the work’s raw origins.

Arum exhibition by Tom Fereday – Photo by Pier Carthew.

Between Planes brought a more reflective sensibility to Melbourne Design Week 2026, with Dean Norton presenting a new series of works that combine mirrors and glass to investigate how surface can imply spatial depth. Rather than passive substrates, the materials function as active elements — capturing light, shifting perspective, and subtly fragmenting whatever surrounds them.

Between Planes exhibition by Dean Norton – Photo by Sean Fennessy.

Felled approached timber from a similarly unconventional angle. Six makers and designers with specialist knowledge of the material moved well beyond newly processed, machined slabs, finding creative potential in timber waste and plant debris — a quiet but pointed argument for rethinking where contemporary woodworking begins.

Felled exhibition – Photo by C. Armstrong.

Curated by Emma Elizabeth and presented by Local Design, LOST HiDE made a case for leather as something far more than surface decoration — a vehicle for experimentation, narrative, and transformation. Bespoke and limited-edition works took centre stage, with overlooked upholstery leathers supplied by Swiss Design used to deliberately blur the boundary between art and design.

Lost Hide exhibition – Photo by Matthew McQuiggan.

Table Manners took a more intimate angle, turning its attention to the objects we repeatedly bring to our mouths. Curated by Object Massive, hosted by Florian Home, and with exhibition design by Streifen, the show gathered a group of designers who each produced a singular set of cutlery distilled from the guiding principles of their own practice — a quietly rigorous premise that yielded some of the festival’s most considered work.

Table Manners exhibition at Melbourne Design Week 2026 – Photo by Sean Fennessy.