Inside Perth Design Week 2025's Interactive Installations for the Home

The eighth iteration of Perth Design Week returns to Boorloo this March, transforming the city's galleries, warehouses and pop-up spaces into laboratories where domestic life becomes a material for experimentation. While past programs have celebrated the polished object and the finished room, the 2025 edition leans boldly into process — into the textures, sounds and gestures that make a house feel inhabited rather than simply photographed.

More than forty interactive installations promise to dismantle the usual distance between visitor and artefact. Visitors won't simply walk around a chair; they will sit in it, stretch fabric across its frame or trigger a sequence of light that rewrites the room's mood. The home is being staged as something alive, with the Western Australian public invited to feel, respond and rearrange.

A program shaped by the senses

The curatorial brief, drafted by the Perth Design Week team in collaboration with local studios and educators from Curtin University's School of Built Environment, frames the home as a setting for sensory exchange. Tactility leads the way: pressed eucalyptus bark panels you can run a palm across, woven screens that shift transparency as you pass, ceramic tiles calibrated to absorb kitchen sound. Each installation is designed to be touched, leaned against or lived with for the duration of the week.

Equally important is sound. Several commissions incorporate field recordings gathered on Country, layered with compositions from Perth-based sound artists. Visitors moving through a reconstructed living room will hear birdsong sourced from Beeliar wetlands, then the hum of an espresso machine, then a quiet Noongar vocal loop — a layered acoustic portrait of southern suburb mornings.

A consistent thread across the program is its attention to local industry. Rather than importing international trend pieces, organisers have prioritised WA manufacturers, recycled-glass suppliers in Maddington and textile producers who supply the Australian fashion industry. The goal, as the festival director has explained in recent interviews, is to demonstrate that an interactive domestic interior can be made entirely from materials sourced within a four-hour drive of the Perth CBD.

Standout installations across the week

The headline commission, occupying the upper floor of the Northbridge drill hall, is a fully walkable floor plan by emerging practice Studio Yawuru-Mandurah. Visitors will step between scaled rooms, each anchored by a piece of manipulable furniture: a reading nook whose lampshade pivots in response to a reader's posture, a kitchen bench that folds down into a dining table, a sleeping alcove lined with acoustic felt harvested from Western Australian wool offcuts.

A quieter but no less compelling piece arrives from designer-maker collective Vasse Felix Studio, who will install a modular pantry wall in the Perth Cultural Centre. The wall, clad in reclaimed jarrah and unfinished brass, holds spice jars and dry goods in a configuration that visitors are actively invited to rearrange. Drawings are provided; the collective hopes the final arrangement, photographed at week's end, will become the basis for a forthcoming commercial range.

The textile strand of the program is anchored by a collaboration that connects contemporary practice with deep cultural continuity. A new curtain commission from a Perth-based maker draws on motifs researched alongside Noongar elders in the Wheatbelt — a project that extends themes explored in a recent Indigenous curtain profile on the site.

First Nations voices and WA makers in dialogue

A persistent question for any Australian design week is how to engage meaningfully with First Nations practice without reducing it to surface decoration. Perth Design Week's answer has been to commission directly, with artists retaining authorship from concept to realised object. This year, three installations draw on Noongar Six Seasons knowledge systems: one tracks shifting daylight through a passive louvre, another choreographs floor colour according to rainfall, and the third replaces conventional alarm logic with a dawn-based lighting sequence aligned to local solar geometry.

Beyond the commissioned pieces, the festival's open-call strand has been reshaped to prioritise WA-based applicants. Of the seventy-odd submissions received this round, two-thirds come from studios with a Western Australian postcode — a marked shift from earlier programs when Melbourne and Sydney practitioners dominated. The result is a more regionally rooted visual language: tones drawn from laterite cliffs at Toodyay, woven forms referencing the reed screens once made along the Swan River, furniture joints borrowed from boat-building workshops in Fremantle.

The role of independent makers is reinforced through the festival's partnership with Perth-made retail co-operative Boorloo Build, which will run a small market weekend in the Perth Cultural Centre forecourt. Visitors can buy direct from potters in their first year of practice, lighting designers working from shared workshops in Osborne Park and a new generation of upholsterers producing single-seat prototypes on a made-to-order basis.

Mapping the installations across Boorloo

The geography of the 2025 program reflects Perth's increasingly confident design ambitions. The Northbridge corridor, long associated with the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and the city's nightlife, becomes the festival's primary artery, with eight satellite installations threaded through laneways off James Street and Lake Street. Each venue is within a short walk of the next, allowing visitors to plot a route that also takes in the many small galleries that define the precinct year-round.

A second cluster gathers around the Perth Cultural Centre, where the State Library, the WA Museum Boola Bardip and the Perth Concert Hall host overlapping programs. Three of the four installations respond directly to the brutalist geometry of the surrounding public buildings, framing them as foils for softer domestic materials. Visitors planning an extended stay might pair this cluster with day trips led by Perth architecture tours across the broader urban fabric.

The Fremantle leg, now in its third year, focuses on adaptive reuse. Several installations take over vacated shopfronts along High Street, their interiors layered with second-fit joinery from the heritage precinct's ongoing restorations. A ferry route between Fremantle and the CBD has been programmed into the festival's official transit map, turning the river crossing itself into an installation of sorts — passengers are handed a printed card describing the architectural sights they are passing.

From gallery to living room

What separates this program from a conventional exhibition is the explicit invitation to translate. Each installation is paired with a published brief that names the Australian manufacturers involved, the materials specified and the approximate square-metre footprint required for replication. Architects and interior designers attending the week in a professional capacity will be able to take these briefs back to their own residential briefs and source the same components through the participating makers.

The festival's industry programming reinforces this handover. A symposium at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre, hosted with the Design Institute of Australia, runs technical sessions on wool-based acoustic panels, recycled concrete benchtops and the regulatory implications of kinetic lighting in heritage-listed homes. These are calibrated for practicing Australian architects rather than casual visitors, with CPD points available through the relevant state bodies.

The evening talks bring together curators from Sydney's Powerhouse, Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria and Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art, alongside Perth-based voices. The conversations centre on how the domestic interior has been represented across Australian contemporary art over the past decade, and where curators see the form heading next. Tickets for evening sessions are included in the standard festival pass.

Practical notes for visitors planning the week

• Book the Saturday morning studio visits in advance; group sizes are capped at eight and sell out weeks ahead.
• Allow time to move between Northbridge and the Cultural Centre on foot; the laneway installations reward a slower pace and are easy to miss when walking briskly.
• Bring headphones for the sound-led installations at the drill hall, where personal audio is recommended.
• Check the festival's online schedule the day before, as several installations shift their opening hours depending on volunteer availability.
• Plan at least one return visit; the tactile pieces change appearance as visitors interact with them and a single visit rarely captures the full program.
• Pair a Fremantle day with the ferry timetable, as the river crossing is itself framed as an architectural installation.
• For designers wanting to continue the conversation beyond the week, the form wrap party at the festival's close offers an informal setting to exchange contacts with the makers and fellow practitioners.

If a single image captures the 2025 program, it is the moment a visitor pulls a curtain aside to reveal a folding bed, or turns a pantry jar to shift the colour temperature of an entire room. Subscribe to Contemporary for ongoing coverage of WA architecture and interiors, and reserve a ticket to Contemporary Wine In Design to keep the conversation going with the makers, architects and designers shaping the region's next chapter.