Melbourne Design Week 2025
at Collingwood Yards
Collingwood Yards is hosting a snapshot of the Melbourne Design Week experience with members of our community, Xflos, Bookshop by Uro and Runner Up handing their spaces over to meditations on design.
Life in Bloom: Floral Design for Farewells – Presented by Open House Melbourne at Xflos
6:30pm, Monday, 19 May
Step into a space where the beauty of flowers takes centre stage, carefully displayed within a sterile, almost morgue-like setting that enhances their intricate details. This unique workshop invites you to explore the delicate art of floral design in an environment thoughtfully curated to make every petal and stem blossom.
Guided by Kayla Moon of Xflos, an experienced florist with a deep connection to both life and death, you’ll learn how to create stunning arrangements that consider their deeper meaning. Kayla’s early experience working in a brightly lit hospital florist, crafting arrangements for families celebrating the start of life and comforting those facing its end and emptying bins next to the hospital waste zone, is as colourful as it is macabre.
In the workshop, you’ll use dead and dying flowers to discover floral techniques but also reflect on the unique role that flowers play in human moments — whether marking a birth, celebrating life, or honouring a loved one at the end of their journey.
Thinking Space | Book Launch and Reading presented by Bookshop by Uro
6pm, Thursday, 22 May
Join author Leon van Schaik for a reading from his new book Thinking Space – a celebration of the art, poetry and philosophy of inhabitation, and its power to change our understanding of the world.
Thinking Space explores how books, and book collecting, have framed van Schaik’s lifelong research into spatial intelligence – the ways in which our past experiences in physical space shape our mental space, which in turn informs how we act in the world.
A journey through the history of the author’s own library (a collection gathered and refined over decades of teaching and thinking about place, space and architecture), the book reveals some of his most prized texts, the often deeply personal relationships they represent, and their influence on him as conceptual touchstones.
Reimagining The Club House presented by Found Golf, Good Sport Magazine and Katie Kelso at Runner Up
Re-imaging the Club House is a 12 hour exhibition, competition and networking opportunity (party) at Runner Up. The event presents design as critical in preserving and challenging the codified behaviour of sporting club houses. The event explores the club house as a site of both inclusion and exclusion that catalyses cultural norms associated with race, gender, politics, environment, access and inclusivity.
Re-imaging the Club House includes a designer floor talk and group exhibition with the works of eight designers working across a variety of mediums. There will be a trophy making competition, where participants will compete in teams using repurposed sports affiliated items.
Found Golf, Katie Kelso and Good Sport Magazine will be staging an intervention at Runner Up bar: come prepared to listen to club music, have a sausage from the community canteen, or purchase your latest kit from the uniform store.
