Licence to snoop: the best of Melbourne's Open House 2016

Being invited to sticky-nose into private houses or privilege-access civic, commercial or industrial buildings is what gives the annual Open House Weekend such attraction that 40,000 people relish getting out in mid-winter to track around the most intriguing buildings of central Melbourne and its suburbs.

In its ninth iteration this weekend, 142 buildings will be opened and these include more radical and recent residential projects, and a number of museum houses in places other than the CBD.

In the 2016 mix are novel homes such as OOF Architects’ triangular Acute House, BKK architect Simon Knott’s own Doll’s House in Northcote, and the petite and perpendicular four-level 5×4 Hayes Lane Project in East Melbourne that occupies an incredibly small site.

Tiny houses with tall stories are well represented in what Open House creative director Emma Telfar says is the “dramatically increased residential list” because another Doll’s House in Collingwood, with a 2.5-metre frontage that was imported as a prefab in the 1870s and occupied by up to five people until the 1970s, is another building to be opened to pre-booked tour groups.

A perennial favourite, Government House, is again accessible to the hoi polloi but new on the menu is a refurbished Gold Rush era, colonial-style cottage out in McKinnon that was once the home of a family of sand-belt flower-growers who somehow jammed 12 of their surviving children into it until they built “The Big House” on their Jasper Road paddocks. The Big House is gone but the refurbished Box Cottage and an outbuilding still stand on the original plot.

Two other house museums illustrate the contrasts of how different halves have lived in Melbourne: Duldig Studio in East Malvern is an authentic preservation of the California Bungalow that for 30 years was home and workspace for Viennese emigrant sculptor Karl Duldig.

In East Melbourne and at the other end of the social scale, is an elegant 1860s white terrace that houses The Johnston Collection in its variously coloured drawing rooms (the green and the yellow), the French sitting room, the study and the dressing room. On display within these refined spaces are the paintings, furniture and objects gathered over a lifetime by the late High Street Armadale antiques dealer William Robert Johnston, who bequeathed the lot to the people of Victoria.

The geographic spread of the buildings reflects, says Telfar, “that we are really trying to reach out across Melbourne and create pockets of interest in more neighbourhoods”.

If this year has added almost 40 new venues, next year, on the 10th anniversary of the snoop-fest, she is hoping 200 buildings will be opened to the public to enjoy for free.