In 2000 Corbett Lyon and Yueji Lyon combined their interests in contemporary art and architecture to develop a new home to accommodate their family and to display works from the Lyon Collection of Australian contemporary art.

A site in Cotham Road Kew was purchased in 2001 and work began on the design and planning of the new building which has been designed as a ‘housemuseum’ – as a house which is capable of displaying contemporary art in appropriately scaled spaces.

The house is located eight kilometres east of Melbourne in the residential suburb of Kew and displays selected works from the Lyon Collection. The Collection includes paintings, sculpture, video work and installations by many of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.

The private house and Collection are open for limited public viewing by appointment on designated days each year. The Housemuseum is also made available for visits by Year 9, 10, 11 and 12 school students on limited days each year.

The Lyon family also sponsor an annual series of art and architecture talks and music events which are held in the Music Room of the house.

The house and its Collection build on a long history of private art collections displayed in residential settings and made available for public viewing. These include Sir John Soane’s House Museum in London, New York’s Frick Collection, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Reed Collection at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art.

The Housemuseum is designed around a two storey ‘white cube’ at the front of the building and a two storey ‘black box’ at the rear. These act as anchors for the house and are used for exhibiting paintings, sculpture, video work, large scale installations and for family living.

Other family living areas flow around these spaces and accommodate further artworks, architectural drawings and artefacts intermixed with the domestic settings of the house.

As an experimental and speculative project the Housemuseum challenges conventional perceptions of space and explores new relationships between art and architecture.