Developers, architects and agents are turning to contemporary Australian art to make their properties stand out from the crowd
5 min
When architect Phillip Mathieson first walked members of Third.i property group through the interiors he had designed for their Kurraba Point “super penthouse”, there were a few raised eyebrows. It wasn’t the million-dollar kit-out of furniture and decor by French luxury brand Liaigre that was disconcerting his clients — it was the art. Not the Brett Whiteley linocut of a dove, or the intricately patterned larrakitj (memorial pole) by Yolngu artist Malaluba Gumana, but the yellow mirrored work by young queer artist Tay Haggarty, which appeared to be pinioned to the wall by four white socks.
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Mathieson, whose architecture firm was charged with the interiors for all 24 residences in Third.i’s new Sydney Harbour-side development (including 21 harbourfront apartments and two sub-penthouses), was given free rein on choosing the art for the penthouses, and engaged the expertise of Artbank: a governmental body whose collection of more than 10,000 Australian artworks spans from the 1920s to now, all available to lease. In the super-penthouse, the selection includes a monumental work in black Belgian marble by the late Melbourne artist Joel Elenberg (who smashed the sales record for Australian sculpture in August 2023 with a similar work, which sold for $925,000) and a mix of abstract and figurative works by significant artists such as Bronwyn Oliver and Marion Borgelt.
Amongst these, Haggarty’s piece stands out: “It’s quite a controversial piece to have in there, given that it’s a very high end development,” says Artbank consultant Carey Corbett, who worked closely with Mathieson Architects to select the works. “I imagine the expected clientele is not so familiar with their work, being a younger artist — and possibly not the sort of artist that some of those prospective buyers would have in their homes.”
But Haggarty’s piece, titled Sun on Bare Back, provides a moment of delicious, cheeky dissonance within the elegant surroundings.
It’s the kind of memorable moment designed to cut through at the top end of the market.
As Mathieson says: “Quite often what happens when there’s a display suite for a project, or even when a project is finished, either it’s left empty or it’s furnished with rental items, and you end up with a bad reproduction poster on the wall; it’s all very generic. The Kurraba project was unusual in that the developer, I think partly because of the market that they were going after and the calibre of the location and the apartment itself, saw the value in buying furniture -— and therefore the natural extension of that was to fully provide the experience of how someone might live.
“The art is part of that.”
Lachie Gibson, founder and CEO of Melbourne developer ANGLE, agrees. His outfit prides itself on providing a holistic package of high quality location, architecture, landscape and interiors — and he sees art as a “crucially important” extension of that. ANGLE champions Australian creatives, partnering with emerging talent (including furniture designer Thomas Lentini, before he broke into the big league) and local heroes such as Dinosaur Designs, design firm Flack Studio, commercial galleries and Artbank, to create distinctive interiors for their high-end residential developments, including the multi-award-winning Fenwick, in Kew.
“We’ve had success over the yearsselling off the plan, but at the end of a project you might have a $6 million penthouse [not yet sold] and so you’re styling it for sale — and the difference between the kind of generic property stylist that the real estate companies use and partnering with someone like Artbank, is huge,” Gibson says.
Even when apartments are sold off the plan, ANGLE typically brokers relationships between buyers and interior designers, who will then do a full furniture and art fit out. “Obviously it’s awesome for the client — it elevates their space and makes it feel incredible. But also for us as a developer, the photographs of those completed spaces become almost our number one marketing tool,” Gibson says.
“It’s pretty easy to go and render something up, but having a built space that’s got amazing artwork is hugely advantageous to us.”
For their latest development, Fenhurst, ANGLE is partnering with Artbank to select hero pieces for the common areas, and with Melbourne gallery Daine Singer for apartment artworks — which will be shown in marketing renders, but available to see in the flesh (and purchase) from the developer’s Harold Street Gallery: a multi-purpose space in Camberwell that was designed by Fleur Sutherland and showcases ANGLE’s regular collaborators alongside a rotating selection of pieces from Artbank and Craft Victoria.
It’s not just developers harnessing art for a competitive edge. When Simon Hakim, CEO of creative agency Hunter, and his wife decided to put their stunning home “Rail House” in Melbourne’s Northcote on the market, they knew they needed art for the massive walls in their central living area.
“Over the years, we’d been talking about putting artwork up there, and had a built-in rail installed specifically for art [but] we couldn’t ever decide on what we liked,” he says. Then a neighbour introduced Hakim to Artbank, which has short and long-term and annual leasing plans that range from $165 to $5500 per annum.
“It was a really good way to test out the art wall — and to see massive works that we were able to display [on the rail] but couldn’t afford,” Hakim says.
In the end, they leased a series ofprints by photographer Bill Henson.
“It filled an empty void; it made a huge impact on the house. [And] we had a lot of comments about the work [from prospective buyers],” says Hakim.
Sydney property agent Georgia Cleary, of McGrath Paddington, says there’s an increased appreciation of art across the market these days, and in the prestige end of the market in particular: “People will pay tens of thousands of dollars to style their properties, and you can’t put prints into those homes.”
McGrath generally asks stylists not to put art on the walls, and instead partners with local artists and galleries to select high-end pieces. “We’ve found that the market responds really well to original works [rather than reproductions or prints],” says Cleary. “It elevates the perception of the property as ‘prestige’.”
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Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
