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Mentored by Georges Mora to collect the works of his peers, Melbourne architect Corbett Lyon has, over the past two decades, assembled one of Australia's most coherent and considered private bodies of contemporary art. In 2000, inspired by the great house museums of Europe and the United States, Lyon and his wife, Yueji, first conceived of a building project that would marry their twin loves with a home that could also function as a gallery open to the public by appointment ...

Michael Fitzgerald: In talking about your Housemuseum, should discussion begin with the architecture or the art?

Corbett Lyon: ... Artist Brian O'Doherty wrote a wonderful book called Inside the White Cube (1976) which traces the relationship between art - in particular paintings - and the spaces which house them. O'Doherty's book, and others looking at traditions of display and exhibition, were important background material for the Housemuseum. In fact, architects and curators have attempted to articulate the relationship between art and architecture for hundreds of years: in early collections in private villas, with Mies van der Rohe and his modernist museums, Frederick Kiesler's work with Peggy Guggenheim and, more recently, with the work of architects such as Frank Gehry.

Our building has clearly referenced the internationalist 'white cube' space, but on the walls and ceilings timber panelling with small printed texts reinterpret the textured wallpapers and decorative surfaces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century private museums. Unlike modern galleries which actually set out to detach the artwork from its connection with daily life, the Housemuseum opens up to the outside ...

MF: How did your own adventure in Australian art begin?

CL: I'd visited the 1990 Albert Tucker retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne and it was one of those life changing moments - I was overwhelmed by Tucker's images of modern evil: antipodean heads and parrots flying through the Australian landscape. I came away from that show very keen to acquire a small Tucker. So I tracked down Georges Mora, Tucker's agent, and he spent the next two hours persuading me that my money might be better spent acquiring a number of works by young contemporary artists - people who were my peers - rather than on a single Tucker. And so I purchased my first painting: Linda Marrinon's Nude in a landscape, 1989, which we still have.

... He gave me two pieces of advice: first to start slowly and to look at as many works and galleries as possible before buying; and second to view collecting as a way of supporting contemporary artists rather than as an investment. Yueji and I married in 1994, and luckily for me she is equally passionate about contemporary art. So for over fifteen years we've had a wonderful shared journey, and our children, who are now 12 and 14 years old, are also very much part of this ongoing family project ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.