Lyon Housemuseum

The Housemuseum building was designed by architect Corbett Lyon and his architectural firm Lyons between 2003 and 2005. The building was completed in November 2008 and opened to the public with its first exhibition in 2009. Inspired by visits he had made as a student to the Sir John Soane's Museum in London and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Lyon designed the new building to explore the relationship between art and living and to contest conventional ideas of public and private space. The design juxtaposes museum spaces with domestic spaces to create a blurring of conventional readings of museum and house, and creates a scenographic setting for the display of works from the Collection. The interior of the building is lined with timber panels which are printed with words and texts created by the family. The exterior of the building is clad in black zinc. The front fence displays the two street names of the building's corner address. These are rendered in 2 metre high letters using decorative corbelled brickwork. In 2010 the Housemuseum won the Australian Institute of Architects' Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award, Victoria's highest design award for residential architecture. Also in 2010 the Housemuseum was cited by Larry's List as 'one of the world's 10 most exciting buildings of private museums'.

An extension to the Housemuseum has been completed (2019) on an adjacent site. The new building, the Housemuseum Galleries, includes large, flexible exhibition spaces to showcase works from the Lyon Collection and to present international and local exhibitions of contemporary art, architecture and design. The new Galleries are managed by the Lyon Foundation, a not-for-profit public art museum entity established in 2012 by the museum's founding patrons, Corbett Lyon and Yueji Lyon.