The story of the design of the Monster’s Salon and Dining rooms may not be one that you’d expect.

It draws on a rich and important chapter of Australian immigration – a re-interpretation of the suburban family rooms of immigrants in Australia from the 1940s to 1980s, post WWII.

It is a layered story of domestic places.

It is at once a parlour for receiving guests, for talking art and politics, a living room for lolling around by the fire with friends, and a room for sharing meals.

The floor is a monolithic polished shattered terrazzo with hidalgoite green oxide seams. Terrazzo was first invented by construction workers in Venice – a low cost way to tile their living rooms with off cuts from work that they sealed with goat’s milk.

An original and unused early 1950s floral-pattern Axminister broadloom carpet from England has been remade as a rug that provides a setting for a collection of armchairs designed by Viennese furniture maker Paul Ernst Kafka who himself emigrated to Australia in 1939.

The rest of the seating is an assembly of Australian vintage boomerang lounges that sit alongside wireframe chairs and original decorative painted metal screens. They sidle up to Kafka side tables and Max Lamb designed nougat-like Marmoreal tables, and engineered marble fashioned by Molonglo Group and its collaborators into dining tables.

Perspex mirrors and plexi-bead columns and totems honour the often over-the-top indulgent adornment of many of the proud suburban lounges of the newly arrived at that time.

The spaces are illuminated with domestic table lamps alongside a massive 1970’s Barovier & Toso Murano chandelier suspended low over a wild veined green quartzite feasting table that comfortably seats up to ten diners.

Shards of 1960s Mazzega opaline glass have been re-appropriated to create a custom column light.

The in-the-round fireplace is the heart of the rooms – the centerpiece back-warmer to settle new arrivals in from chilly winter evenings. Views across Lake Burley Griffin to Parliament House and the surrounding mountains contextualise the space into its uniquely Australian landscape.

An eclectic mix of Greek icons, 1850s oil paintings and 1960s neon prints as well as objects collected in curiosity shops and flea markets gild the whole, telling precious folk stories, which if left untold would disappear.

This chapter is about how immigration increases the textures, layers and dimensions of a place’s cultural fabric.

It is an important story. Especially in a time when the number of people displaced by conflict is at its highest number ever since the aftermath of WWII.

It is a combination of old and borrowed ways that at once salutes the past and act as an offering in the hope for pluralism and diversity now and in the future.

A few weeks ago, we went to visit John Forrester Clack at his home and studio in Gundaroo. We talked for a long time. Of his work, of love, and others things.

John’s work is self-exploratory. He draws, paints and sculpts, mainly self-portraits. Heads that draw on different emotions. In many ways it seems that John’s art is a way for him to reconcile himself within himself. “My pictures aren’t pretty pictures. They are about being deeply human as well as being deeply connected emotionally and spiritually”.

“What I’m doing as an artist is shedding skins. This is what I am today. You get it out and then you can leave that part on the floor.”

We talked in his studio, fitted with big windows for their generous natural light. John made the studio with his landlord whom he likes a lot. The door is pretty much always open to let the paint fumes out. The walls are covered in layers and layers of paint splatters, offcuts of wood lean up against the walls; tools and brushes hang from the ceiling.

“It’s grubby and oily and it stinks in here. But I feel free here.” John says.

He tells us the story of Francis Bacon and how he lived in a grotty bedsit studio in Reece Mews in London for years, painting away. And then he started selling his work for millions of pounds and so he took his bundle of cash and moved to a beautiful studio. But he found that he couldn’t paint in this nice new space… So he had to move back to the hovel.

The right space is important, John says. It helps you feel free to work things out.

“Part of making art is producing shit. You either have to change it, destroy it or start again. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel defeated.

You can work away for hours and not get anywhere, and then suddenly you experience this thing… This grace.

And then it works. I’m really grateful when it does. I think ‘that’s amazing, I can’t believe it’s there’.”

John grew up far away from his studio in Gundaroo, amongst the slag heaps of a mining valley in Wales. It sounds like it was a difficult place to grow up.

“For all the scars that childhood leaves us, it has given me a powerful engine, insight, a way to see things spiritually and emotionally.”

“My work is about embedded memory and emotion. And love. We share love. Love is really it. Art gave me a place to put it.”

It’s very fitting, given the nature of John’s work, this exploration of memory and love, that he will be exhibiting alongside his son Tobias.

There was once the idea for a restaurant at NewActon that never eventuated. But the story is such a nice one that I’m still going to tell it.

What was nice about it? A) It was being designed by Craig Tan who is a really special architect. B) Craig had enlisted textile artist Naomi Ota to co-create the space.

Craig’s idea for the restaurant was to create a sequence of small spaces and experiences that have different qualities so that people can find the one that suits them best. He wanted to give each space richness and depth without being too prescriptive. What he was looking for was a materiality that would give a different acoustic, tactile or visual sense so as to give a different feel to each space.

This is where the idea of using ropes came in. They offer all these things as well as the possibility of playing with light and shadows and really giving each space its own sensibility. And enter Naomi Ota.

Naomi is an installation artist who uses fabrics and fibrous materials to make a range of works from small detailed pieces to large spatially interactive designs.

Unusually, for a textile artist, Naomi is interested in interaction and negative space. She is all about interdisciplinary collaboration working on performance projects with the likes of dancer Tony Yap and musicians Tim Humphrey and Madeline Flynn. She judges her recent works on their capacity to invite other elements such as movement and sound into them. It’s a pretty perfect conceptualisation for a restaurant. It is this thinking that landed her the would be gig. Her technical knowledge of fibre and knots and her beautiful, organic aesthetic also doesn’t hurt.

To really get the sentiment behind Naomi’s works, I think you need to know about the Japanese concepts of “hare” and “ke”. The hare experience (or hare day) is a special day for rituals where everyone is free to celebrate and join in – it’s the extraordinary. Ke is an everyday day, the mundane, where you haul yourself around and things don’t work out. Naomi’s works strive for the hare. She loves the moment in her performance installation work when “something happens” the elements and the audience interact and create a special moment that is different every time.

Amazingly, though they come from different disciplines, cultures and experiences, Naomi and Craig’s take on how to make a space a place for introspection and experience was very similar. Really, they were looking to turn ke into hare – striving to make the extraordinary within an ordinary setting.