On Saturday 12th of September, Sydney’s design showrooms will open their doors for Saturday Indesign, bringing architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting and material design together across Paddington, Surry Hills, Waterloo and Alexandria.

Running from 9am to 5pm, this year’s event spans more than 35 showroom locations, with 40-plus exhibitors, over 150 brands and around 100 activations scheduled across the four precincts. Complimentary hop-on, hop-off buses will connect the different areas throughout the day, allowing attendees to build their own route through the program.

For anyone new to Saturday Indesign, the format is deliberately different from a conventional trade show. There is no central exhibition hall to work through. Instead, the city becomes the venue, with brands opening their permanent showrooms and transforming them through installations, product launches, discussions, workshops, food and a fair amount of experimentation.

Saturday Indesign has increasingly shifted its attention from simply showing finished products towards revealing more of the process behind them: how things are made, why materials behave as they do, what designers learn when projects do not go to plan and what becomes possible when specifiers can speak directly with the people manufacturing what they use. The event’s broader direction this year puts shared knowledge, emerging designers and active participation ahead of passive product viewing.

At Mobilia in Alexandria, the Southern Hemisphere premiere of the Eames Office Indoor Pavilion brings a project developed by the Eames Office with Kettal directly from Triennale Milano. The pavilion uses the modular architectural system conceived by Charles and Ray Eames for the Eames Houses, while Kettal Workplace will bring another line back from Milan with new work by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby and Foster + Partners alongside a re-edition of Verner Panton. The showroom will also host a competition to win a trip to Barcelona, including a visit to the Kettal factory and Barcelona Pavilion, with the winner announced at 2.30pm.

At Savage Design in Surry Hills, its new Ministry of Metals experience grew from the idea that designers learn differently when they are able to physically handle and alter a material. Visitors can work with brass ageing and surface treatments in The Brass Lab, compare the properties of different metals through Metal Confessions and hear from Savage Design director Joel Savage and creative director James Groom. We recently joined a preview session, where what could easily have become a technical presentation instead involved designers testing weight, flex, corrosion and patina for themselves.

Nearby, K5 Furniture is taking a more atmospheric route. Haltija: The Guardian of Every Place and Thing draws on the guardian spirits of Finnish folklore, transforming the Surry Hills showroom through Nikari furniture, Marimekko textiles and a sculptural forest landscape. The installation looks beyond the familiar umbrella of Scandinavian design to consider the particular traditions, materials and mythology that have shaped Finnish design.

Related: Getting hands-on with Savage Design’s Ministry of Metals

At Nook Collections, glass artists Mark and Simi Eliott will lead Crafting Light, a live glassblowing experience in which 20 participants each add coloured molten glass to a growing sculptural form. The finished piece will later be kiln-fired into a one-off light, with one of the participants ultimately taking it home.

Chris Ma will lead Clay Play at Kaolin Tiles in Alexandria, an intimate workshop in which 20 guests create and glaze their own tile. Rather than leaving as 20 separate objects, the tiles will later be fired and assembled into a single coffee table under Kaolin’s direction. Later in the afternoon, the showroom will offer a first look at NING, its new collection of handmade Chinese porcelain tiles.

Over in Waterloo, Fermob is asking the design community to predict the future of its colour palette. The French brand will add two new colours in 2027 and, between 11am and 1pm, visitors can mix the tone they believe is missing from the range and attempt to predict one of the forthcoming shades. The closest guesses will win a Luxembourg Drinks Trolley in their winning colour.

For those who prefer their competition slightly less chromatic, Hali Rugs will run Wool You Hit It? throughout the day, challenging visitors to land a rug pom on a ball of yarn for the chance to win a $5,000 Hali voucher. At Ellison Studios, meanwhile, the stakes move to the ping-pong table. Its all-day tournament culminates in finals from 4pm, alongside a one-day Sydney edition of Melbourne book fair Selected Objects, with out-of-print titles, first editions and art and design books on offer. From 3pm, the furniture moves into the carpark for Drinks and Decks, complete with vinyl and an outdoor block party.

The conversations behind the objects

The Design Discussions and speaker program provides another strand running through the day. Instead of separating conversation from the showroom experience, many of this year’s sessions are closely connected to the installations and materials surrounding them.

At Hali Rugs, Georgina Wilson of Georgina Wilson Associates, Shona McElroy of Smac Studio and stylist Bea Lambos will join Hali Managing Director Dan Swart for The Rules We’d Break, looking at the conventions designers ignore, the trends they would happily retire and occasions when breaking an accepted rule led somewhere more interesting.

At LightCo in Alexandria, Perspectives on Transformation runs throughout the day, beginning with Catriona Venn of Electrolight at 9.30am before further sessions with an international special guest, Cushla McFadden of Tom Mark Henry and Lachlan Kirkland of YSG. Between the longer talks, Community Voices gives emerging and established designers ten minutes each to put an idea to the room.

In Surry Hills, Euroluce, Bolon and Bang & Olufsen will present Sensory Surface, combining installations around light, sound and material with two live discussions moderated by Alice Blackwood at 11am and 3pm. Elsewhere in the showroom, visitors can see Flos’ MAAP collection by Erwan Bouroullec alongside new work from Vibia and Wästberg and Oluce’s Milan 60 Years classics.

That mix of established voices and more informal participation is an important part of where Saturday Indesign is heading. A good design event cannot rely on products alone. It needs opportunities to ask why something was made in a particular way, hear opposing views, understand a process and occasionally discover something that was not on the itinerary in the first place.

There is, naturally, some incentive to cover ground. This year’s Design Passport gives attendees who check in at 10 or more participating locations entry into a prize pool worth more than $25,000, with contributions from brands including Advanta, Bang & Olufsen, Ellison Studios, Euroluce, Fermob, Hali Rugs, LightCo, Mobilia, Momo Handles, Space Furniture, Special Lights, Talostone and Wilkhahn.

But the more compelling reason to move between precincts is the variation itself. One hour might involve watching molten glass being worked in Surry Hills, the next testing materials in Alexandria or mixing colours in Waterloo. Product launches sit alongside book fairs, panels, workshops, food, competitions and installations that temporarily alter familiar showrooms.

That is also where the scale of Saturday Indesign becomes useful. With four precincts and more than 35 locations, seeing absolutely everything is unlikely to be the point. The day works more like a choose-your-own route through Sydney’s design community, with the free bus network making it possible to move between Paddington, Surry Hills, Waterloo and Alexandria without treating the program as a checklist.

And once the showrooms close at 5pm, the day is not finished. The Official Saturday Indesign Afterparty begins at 6pm upstairs at The Woollahra Hotel, extending the day’s conversations into the evening.

More than two decades after Saturday Indesign first began bringing the industry into showrooms, the underlying proposition remains remarkably straightforward: design is different when encountered in person. In 2026, however, there is a stronger invitation to get closer to it — to make something, test something, question something and speak directly with the people behind it.

Saturday Indesign
Saturday 12 September 2026
9am–5pm
Paddington, Surry Hills, Waterloo and Alexandria
Free registration

Register for Saturday Indesign 2026
saturdayindesign.com/register