Heide | Museum of Modern Art

On a road trip earlier this year, we finally made it to Heide, a public art museum and garden on Melbourne's outskirts—a place-making haven, brimming with art, architecture and landscape.
Today this Museum of Modern Art is surrounded by suburbia and highways, but when John and Sunday Reed bought the property in 1934 it was an old dairy farm with an original Victorian weatherboard farmhouse. Here they created a life devoted to art and ideas, opening their home to painters, writers and intellectuals. Their free-spirited generosity and patronage helped nurture some of Australia's most important modern artists, ultimately leaving Heide as an enduring cultural legacy for Victoria and beyond.

Wherever we travel, we seek out galleries, studios, architecture, adaptive-reuse residences, or warehouse conversions—it’s our thing. 
I was drawn to Heide's bohemian foundation story. It reminded me of discovering, in the mid-1990s, the now well-documented story of Charmaine Clift and the circle of writers and artists who gathered on the Greek island of Hydra. Both places reveal how creativity can become inseparable from place, shaping not just buildings, but cultural identity itself.
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In the contemporary gallery, Heide III, was a retrospective of Australian artist John Nixon (1949–2020); his practise of abstract art was "driven by a spirit of experimentation and a deep engagement with radical modernism". 

Showing in Heide II was the super fun and inspiring exhibition Face Everything by Nell,  joyfully curated in this clever light-filled modernist space with a palette of timeless materials.  The site-responsive exhibition captures the spirit of the place, as observed by Modern Art Director Lesley Harding. 

Despite not knowing either of these artists, Heide, like all good galleries, does more than showcase familiar names. Even when you know nothing about the artist, there is plenty here that will surprise, delight or stay with you.

In Heide I, the original Victorian weatherboard farmhouse, surrounded by the gardens that Sunday Reed lovingly established and valued as highly as the architecture itself, Radical Nurture celebrated the many facets of life at Heide—motherhood, art, politics, patriarchy and friendship. Sympathetically restored, it still feels like a home with an incredible archive of books and photo albums of the time. 

While they lived for many years in this original Victorian weatherboard farmhouse, Sunday and John Reed were deeply interested in modern architecture and wanted to build a house that reflected contemporary ideas about art and living. Sunday came from Melbourne's prominent Baillieu family, whose wealth and long tradition of philanthropy helped provide the means to realise that vision.

The dream was to build a living gallery where they could live and exhibit.  Heide II was commissioned in 1963 and designed by David McGlashan and Neil Everist of the firm McGlashan Everist. It was completed in 1967.
Heide II wasn't simply a new house;  John Reed described it as "a gallery to be lived in." John and Sunday Reed lived at Heide II until they died in 1981. The Heide property had already been gifted to the Victorian Government in 1980, and the Heide Museum of Modern Art opened to the public in 1981. 

Interesting side note: Following the deaths of John and Sunday Reed in 1981, their close friend, poet, editor and arts advocate Barrett Reid continued living in the original farmhouse until he died in 1995, acting as a quiet custodian of Heide and its remarkable cultural legacy. His life tenancy meant that after the Reeds died, Heide I remained a lived-in home rather than immediately becoming a museum piece. In a sense, he bridged the gap between the Reeds' private world and the public museum we visit today.

Following an extensive conservation restoration undertaken between 2005 and 2006, Heide II was carefully returned to reflect John and Sunday Reed's original vision. Original finishes, built-in furniture and the relationship between the house and its gardens were conserved, allowing visitors to experience one of Australia's finest examples of modernist domestic architecture much as the Reeds intended.

Check the website for upcoming events and exhibitions here