The Melbourne School of Design invites you to step across the threshold of a full-scale replica of the home that was one of the closest to the Griffins' hearts: their own. Pholiota was the name Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony gave to their tiny Melbourne house in Eaglemont in the 1920s, built with the innovative Knitlock system of interlocking bricks they invented and patented as the future for Australian suburbia.

For the first time Pholiota has been 'unlocked' with a 1:1 reconstruction by Master of Architecture students led by Phil Goad, Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, installed within the Melbourne School of Design’s state-of the-art interior. Experience the Griffins’ prescient vision for urban living, complemented by 13 new designs for a contemporary Pholiota.

A New Pholiota, an interactive virtual reality experience developed by the Microsoft Research Centre for SocialNUI at the University of Melbourne, will allow visitors to experience a vision for a twenty-first century Pholiota from the interior of the physical model of the original.

IMAGE | Exterior view of ‘Pholiota’, the Griffins’ own house, 23 Glenard Drive, Heidelberg, Victoria. Griffin, Walter Burley, 1876-1937, Griffin, Marion Mahony, 1871-1961 Photograph date: between 1925 and 1930. Eric Milton Nicholls Collection. National Library of Australia.