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Melbourne’s Design Award Winners And Finalists To Visit This Winter
From Armadale fashion flagships to Cremorne bakeries, CBD dining rooms and cultural landmarks, these 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards finalists are Melbourne spaces worth stepping inside.
Melbourne has always known how to make a room feel loaded with intent. A bakery can feel like a gallery, a station like a civic event, a museum exhibition like a full-body reminder to pay attention. Now, the 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards have made it official.
Victoria has had a major night at this year’s awards, with Museums Victoria taking out the Installation Design Award for Our Wondrous Planet at Melbourne Museum, while Hassell, Weston Williamson and Partners, and RSHP won the Public Design Award for the Metro Tunnel Project’s Town Hall Station. Kennedy Nolan’s William Street Chambers was also named Best of State Commercial for Victoria, with Pop Architecture’s Onward House taking out Best of State Residential.
Consider this your design-led hit list of the Melbourne and Victorian spaces worth visiting first, from award-winning public projects and immersive museum design to cult fashion flagships, moody dining rooms, pastry temples, record bars and houses with serious main-feed appeal. Not just for what they sell, serve or show, but for how they make you want to move through the city differently.
The Australian Interior Design Award Winners
Our Wondrous Planet at Melbourne Museum
Winner: Installation Design Award
Our Wondrous Planet turns Melbourne Museum’s natural history collection into a walk-through act of wonder. Museums Victoria moves visitors from polar ice to reef, rainforest canopy and life beneath the soil, using more than 800 animal specimens, tactile interactives, projections and First Peoples knowledge to make ecology feel immediate rather than abstract. It is science with pulse and scale: clever, curious and built to leave you looking harder at the world outside.
Melbourne Museum, Carlton Gardens
Town Hall Station
Winner: Public Design Award
Melbourne’s commute just picked up an awards-season glow. Designed by Hassell, Weston Williamson and Partners, and RSHP, Town Hall Station turns the Metro Tunnel into public design with real presence: arched volumes, natural light, clear wayfinding and an entry that speaks to the civic weight of its CBD setting. It is transport infrastructure with a sense of occasion, slipping beneath the city with far more grace than the average weekday commute deserves.
Town Hall Station, Melbourne CBD
Shop
Henne
Henne’s High Street flagship has the cool restraint of a wardrobe built by someone with excellent taste and no interest in showing off. AP Design House works light, steel, glass, vintage pieces and 80s-to-90s rag-trade references into a space that feels tactile, exacting and very Melbourne in its refusal to overexplain itself.
1008 High Street, Armadale
Kat the Label
Kat the Label’s Armadale flagship knows lingerie retail does not need velvet clichés or blush-pink theatrics to feel desirable. Designed by Angus Edward and Interior Design Office, the High Street store pares things back so the product can do the talking, giving the brand a grown-up, confident home with serious fashion-girl reach.
1096 High Street, Armadale
Song for the Mute
Foolscap turns Song for the Mute’s Melbourne boutique into luxury retail with a pulse. Inspired by vinyl records and the record player, the space plays with movement, mood and seasonal flexibility, giving the cult fashion label a store that feels less like a transaction and more like stepping inside someone’s beautifully strange record collection.
Shop R01-057, QV Melbourne, Corner of Lonsdale Street and Swanston Street, Melbourne
Above The Clouds
Above The Clouds brings sneaker culture to Collins Street with more restraint than hype. Pattern Studio’s second store for the cult Australian fashion retailer uses reuse-minded design, a luminous ice-blue rotunda, textured surfaces and sorbet-toned display moments to make streetwear feel considered, tactile and grown into its Melbourne postcode.
Shop T0.07/80 Collins Street, Melbourne
Eat & Drink
Yiaga
Inside Fitzroy Gardens’ former Pavilion Cafe, Yiaga turns dinner into a study in restraint, craft and place. Wardle’s redesign keeps the garden close, with Australian-made materials, a new open kitchen and a 44-seat dining room led by Hugh Allen. Fine dining, but with leaves at the windows and Melbourne’s design brain switched all the way on.
Fitzroy Gardens, East Melbourne
Loving Our Guide to These Melbourne Design Award Finalists? You’ll Also Enjoy…
Harriot
Harriot is the CBD dinner booking with a design-awards brain. At the base of 555 Collins Street, Studio Esteta gives the Tipo 00 team’s French-leaning bistro a room of cafe curtains, curved banquettes, custom stone, warm timber and aged brass, all calibrated for pasta, sweetbreads, steak, Burgundy and low-stakes glamour. European in spirit, Melbourne in address, and far too good-looking for a midweek “quick bite”.
555 Collins Street, Melbourne CBD
Suupaa
Suupaa brings Japanese konbini culture to Cremorne with enough colour, chrome and graphic punch to wake up the whole street. Designed by IF Architecture for the team behind Future Future, the hybrid fast-casual restaurant and convenience store turns everyday dining into something sharper: a snack run and a design hit, with bento, sandos, onigiri and a room that makes quick food feel anything but throwaway.
Shop 1/65 Dover Street, Cremorne
Baker Bleu Cremorne
Baker Bleu Cremorne makes bread feel worthy of a plinth. IF Architecture’s dual-shortlisted bakery and retail space treats the cult loaves, bagels and pastries as the main event, framed by recycled aluminium, warm grey terrazzo, folded galvanised steel and American oak. The result is part working bakery, part design object, and exactly where Melbourne’s most aesthetically serious people pretend they only came for sourdough.
65 Dover Street, Cremorne
Mega Lune
Mega Lune turns the croissant run into a full design pilgrimage. In Addition’s Lonsdale Street flagship takes Melbourne’s pastry obsession and scales it up with cult-level confidence, all crisp geometry, retail drama and buttery anticipation. It is less grab-and-go, more cathedral for laminated dough, built for anyone who has ever treated a Lune box like precious cargo.
670 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
Mayfair Cafe
Mayfair turns the corporate lobby coffee run into something far sharper. Set within 171 Collins Street, Hassell’s design works with the building’s faceted glazing and travertine bones, layering a sculptural concrete bench, glass-batten backdrop and tucked-away banquettes into a cafe that feels tailored, architectural and far too elegant for a rushed oat latte.
171 Collins Street, Melbourne
Notting Hill Hotel
The Nott’s front bar has had work done, but blessedly, not the personality-removal kind. Studio Y reworked the beloved 1870s pub after consulting its famously devoted regulars, keeping the local lore intact while bringing in cork, green velvet flooring, pool tables, big screens and a fresh hit of old-school pub swagger. Heritage, but with a better haircut.
260-262 Ferntree Gully Road, Notting Hill
Stay
Hannah St Hotel
Hannah St Hotel turns a tricky Southbank pocket into one of Melbourne’s most design-charged stays. Inside the 188-room Queensbridge hotel, Flack Studio works across art deco, mid-century curves, Memphis colour, custom furniture and women-led art to create rooms with blush carpet, navy bathrooms, Marshall speakers and serious city-view drama. Coupette, Bar Hannah, Carriage Lounge and The Terrace Lounge bring The Mulberry Group into the fold, making this a hotel with plenty to do after check-in.
19 Walker Street, Southbank
Barwon Heads Golf Club
Barwon Heads Golf Club is old-money coastal Victoria with the dust shaken off. Nexus Designs and Demaine Partnership have reworked the 100-year-old, heritage-listed clubhouse above 13th Beach with rare sensitivity, restoring accommodation, dining rooms, conference spaces, the billiard room and social areas while keeping its Arts and Crafts soul intact. Sandier palettes, crafted furnishings, and long views of the dunes make this less clubhouse cliché and more coastal institution entering its next century with excellent manners.
Golf Links Road, Barwon Heads
See
The Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne
The Potter’s Parkville comeback is all brains and architectural verve. Wood Marsh has expanded the museum into the heritage 1930s Physics Annex, linking three historic buildings across four levels with a concave, mirrored portal, a vaulted foyer, galleries, teaching rooms, and hospitality spaces. After years closed for redevelopment, it returns as a campus cultural room with presence: academic, artful and far cooler than a university museum has any right to be.
Corner of Swanston Street and Masson Road, Parkville
Need to Know: 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards
The Australian Interior Design Awards recognise excellence across Australia’s interior design industry, with categories spanning hospitality, retail, residential, workplace, public and installation design. The 2026 shortlist was published online on 17th April 2026.
The 2026 shortlist features 226 projects nationally, including a strong run of Melbourne and Victorian spaces across hospitality, retail, residential, public and cultural design.
The 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards winners and commendations will be revealed at the gala presentation dinner in Sydney on Friday, 12th June 2026. Full details will be published in the awards gallery on 13th June 2026.
Because some of the city’s most interesting new spaces are in the running, from cult retail flagships and pastry temples to dining rooms, record bars, hotels and public interiors. Your shortlist includes 92 Melbourne-relevant projects, giving readers plenty of stylish places to bookmark before the winners are named.
Melbourne’s 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards finalists are more than rooms to admire from a distance. They are places you can shop, eat, drink, stay and step inside right now, from Armadale fashion flagships and Cremorne bakeries to CBD dining rooms, Southbank hotels and cultural spaces changing the way the city looks and feels. Before the winners are announced, consider this your design-lover’s map to the Melbourne interiors worth seeing first. Once you’re done, keep the mood going with the city’s most beautiful cinemas and fine dining restaurants where the room is every bit as memorable as what’s on the plate.
