From zero to hero: how street art got a makeover
Once the scourge of the neighbourhood, street art is building community and adding value in colourful and collaborative ways across Australia
5 min
From the Spring issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine, on sale now. Order your copy here.
When Zoe Wilson and her husband moved into their two bedroom terrace on Newtown’s Dickson Street in December 2020, one of the first things on their agenda was a paint job: not the inside or the front of the house, but the side wall, facing onto a graffiti-covered laneway. It was big and white — and heavily tagged. The couple called the council — who cleaned it off — but before long, the wall had been tagged again. And so began a seemingly endless cycle of tagging and clean-up — the same cycle plaguing councils across Australia, and costing more than $2 billion annually to remove.
In Wilson’s case, there was a circuit breaker: she applied to the Inner West Council’s Perfect Match street art program, which pairs residents, businesses and property owners with artists to create murals on public walls. She and her husband were matched with David Cragg, an artist of Irish, Scottish, Bundjalung and Biripai ancestry who had grown up in the area. The resulting landscape mural, which now covers the house’s laneway wall, pays tribute to the site’s history as a tributary feeding into the Gumbramorra wetlands and Goolay’yari (Cooks River) and features native flora and fauna, including a giant kookaburra.
“My daughter is three, and when she talks about what to do if she ever gets lost, she’s like, ‘I’ll just say I live in the kookaburra house!’ It’s sort of known now around here,” says Wilson. “I’ll be inside or out the front and see people stop and take photos — and it’s just a really nice chance to have a chat and meet more people in the community.”
It seems to have solved the tagging problem, too: the wall has been tagged just once in roughly 18 months since the mural was unveiled in 2023, and its waterproof coating is designed to make graffiti removal quick and easy in the event it happens again.
No wonder, then, that Perfect Match has proved a hit. Since the program started in 2014, applications by residents have increased a whopping 926 percent, and now outstrip the council’s funding pool. What started as a graffiti removal initiative has turned into a bona fide public art program, with council paying artists — many of whom started out in illegal graffiti — to create more than 170 works on walls. Similar inner city programs, such as StreetWORKS in Melbourne’s Maribyrnong LGA, have also proved popular.
These initiatives are emblematic of a diversification of government policies over the last three decades, as the criminalised subculture of graffiti, once seen as a the scourge of inner city neighbourhoods, evolved into a broader, more palatable genre called “street art” — and thence from the margins to the mainstream. At this point, street art has been collected and exhibited by museums, co-opted by luxury brands and advertising agencies, and embraced by high end hotels such as the Hilton, which commissioned pioneering Melbourne street art collective Juddy Roller to paint the facade exterior of its Little Queen Street outpost.
In Victoria, state and local governments have shifted from the “zero tolerance” and “rapid removal” policies of the 80s, 90s and 00s to embrace graffiti as a fundamental part of their identity. Hosier Lane, once a grungy testing ground for young graffiti artists, is now a major tourist attraction, drawing 1.4 million visitors annually. The Wimmera Mallee region is attracting visitors from overseas and interstate — and particularly grey nomads — with its silo art trail, which Visit Victoria spruiks as “the country’s biggest outdoor gallery”.
For street artist Helen Proctor, who cut her teeth in the illegal graffiti scene but now paints commissioned street art murals in Sydney’s Inner West, the silo art movement represents a tipping point. “Every time I speak to someone over 70, they ask ‘Have you painted a silo?’ Getting that demographic interested in street art is amazing — they were the ones yelling at us (when we were teenagers) to put down the spray can! But they have an appreciation (for the silo murals) because of the size and the technique that goes into it, and it’s a subject matter that they can relate to.”
The slippery politics of taste is at the heart of graffiti culture in Australia: what is art to some people is vandalism to others, and treated accordingly. The government-led graffiti wars have not ended — they’ve simply shifted territory and tactics, in line with changing demographics and community taste, and with the rise of the “creative cities” theory, which ascribes economic value to creative culture. Painting or spraying anything on the walls of a building you don’t own without permission remains illegal in every state, punishable by prison. But councils, who are on the frontline of maintaining the “clean community”, take a more nuanced view.
In the past year, the City of Melbourne has removed roughly 112,000 square metres (equivalent to five MCGs) of graffiti, focusing on tags, but they leave street art strongholds such as Hosier Lane alone. “They’re places of cultural significance and heritage,” says City of Melbourne Councillor Jamal Hakim. “There’s a social licence [(or artists to paint there illegally).” Even when councils are removing graffiti elsewhere, they can see it’s not working.
“We can’t do that forever, it doesn’t actually solve the problem,” says Cr Hakim. “It’s a never-ending cycle.”
Shannan Whitney, who has seen the shift in attitudes over the last three decades as an inner city Sydney resident, real estate agent and co-founder of BresicWhitney, says that although homebuyers don’t necessarily see graffiti or street art as a value add yet, they — like councils — recognise it as a part of the cultural tapestry of certain suburbs.
“(Today in Newtown) I was in a $10 million building that was covered in (illegal) graffiti…it was allowed because the people who own it see that as being suitable for the environment they live in, and they like it.”
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5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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