Australian homewares brands worth knowing.
Twenty-four independent Australian homewares brands, from a Sydney porcelain studio that mixes its own colours to a Hobart ceramicist glazing on Goulburn Street. Every one of them checked on its own website, none of them paid to be here.
Australian homewares is one of the most crowded categories online and one of the least well documented. Search for it and you get affiliate lists, chain retailers and pages that were assembled without anyone opening a single brand's website. So we made the version we wanted to read.
Every brand below was verified on its own site. We opened each one, read the About page, and took a specific detail from it: who started it, where it is made, what the material is. Where a site did not state a founding year, we left the year blank rather than inventing one. Where we could not confirm a brand at all, we dropped it, and we dropped about a dozen. Nobody paid to be here and there are no affiliate links on this page.
Ceramics, tableware and glass
Mud Australia
Shelley Simpson's porcelain is still cast by hand in Sydney, using clay sourced from Limoges and mixed on site into nineteen bespoke colours.
Dinosaur Designs
Louise Olsen and Stephen Ormandy had to invent their own resin techniques in the eighties. Four decades on, pieces are still made by hand in their Sydney studio.
Angus & Celeste
Keir Angus MacDonald and Asha Celeste Cato build their botanical ceramics from photography, 3D rendering, screen-printing and plaster turning, with small family-run potteries they visit in person.
Robert Gordon
A third-generation family pottery. Robert Andy Gordon started it in 1945 and the Pack Track studio followed in 1979. Their site separates the Australian-made ranges from the imported collections, which is more transparency than most offer.
Kim Wallace Ceramics
Every piece is individually handmade by a small team of makers in the Noosa studio on Leo Alley Road. The tagline is the whole proposition: from our hands to your table.
Hobart Hills
Hamish Gibson slip-casts and hand-glazes on site in Goulburn Street, using custom clay bodies in colours drawn from the Tasmanian landscape.
Maison Balzac
Elise Pioch Balzac makes hand-blown coloured glassware and fragrance, and describes the range as jewellery for the table. Boutiques in the Strand Arcade and Surry Hills.
Fazeek
Jackie Fazekas hand-pours fragrance in Melbourne in small batches, and the drinkware is made with women-led manufacturing partners. Colour is not an accent here, it is language.
Glass by Emma Klau
Emma Klau graduated in hot glass from the University of South Australia in 2007 and has worked from a JamFactory studio since her associateship in 2011.
Bed linen and textiles
IN BED
Pip Vassett's heavy linen uses certified European Flax, grown, spun and woven entirely in Europe under Masters of Linen certification. Made to be lived in, as the site puts it.
Bed Threads
Genevieve and Alan launched from near Bondi Beach with a single French flax linen set. It sold out in three weeks.
Kip&Co
Sisters Kate Heppell and Hayley Pannekoecke started with Alex McCabe as a bright bedding label, then expanded across the whole house.
Sage x Clare
Phoebe Bell started the label after finding artisanal textiles on a holiday in India. The range is hand-tufted, punch-needled, screen-printed and hand-woven.
Bonnie and Neil
Bonnie Ashley and Neil Downie combined textile design, floristry and furniture-making. Every print starts as one of Bonnie's hand-painted artworks.
Utopia Goods
Bruce Slorach and Sophie Tatlow print interior fabrics drawn from Australian botanicals, with a store on Oxford Street.
Pampa
Designed in Byron Bay and hand-loomed from natural wool by artisan weavers in remote Argentina. The site is upfront that the weaving happens there, not here.
Mujo Store
A Perth studio and shop making hand-woven textiles and hand-built ceramics in house, alongside handcrafted pieces sourced from Japan.
Candles and home fragrance
Byron Bay Candles
A family business hand-pouring soy candles and reed diffusers on site in the Arts and Industry Estate, more than two decades in.
Ivy & Wood
It began with Jess making candles as gifts in her kitchen. She and partner Brad now hand-pour soy-coconut wax with cotton wicks.
Saide
Hand-poured in a Bayside Brisbane studio, with a vegan range formulated without parabens, phthalates or sulphates.
Lighting and furniture
Coco Flip
Kate Stokes and Haslett Grounds make most pieces in small local batches. The Dancer range is hand-formed in mid-fire clay with ceramicist Belinda Wiltshire.
RS Studio
Rael Solomon precision-cuts, assembles and hand-finishes every lamp in Melbourne from sustainably sourced Australian timber, then inspects each one individually.
Jardan
Family owned since Nick, Michael and Barry Garnham took over in 1997. The upholstery and timber factories share a sixteen thousand square metre headquarters in Scoresby.
Koskela
Russel Koskela and Sasha Titchkosky partner with First Nations art centres including Tjanpi Desert Weavers, and have returned $1.6 million to those communities.
What the good ones have in common
We work in this category, so we read these sites differently than a shopper does. Four things kept showing up on the brands that are clearly winning, and none of them are about the product.
They answer "who made this" in the first screen
Mud names Shelley Simpson. Dinosaur Designs names Louise and Stephen. Ivy and Wood tells you it started in Jess's kitchen. Homewares is a considered purchase, and a considered purchase is a trust purchase. The brands that hide behind "we" are asking for that trust without offering anything to base it on.
They are specific about material and origin, including when it is inconvenient
Pampa says plainly that the weaving happens in Argentina. Robert Gordon separates its Australian-made ranges from its imported collections. IN BED names the certification. That kind of precision reads as confidence, and it is also the detail that survives a comparison between two tabs.
Their category pages do the work, not their homepage
Almost nobody arrives at a homewares site through the front door. They arrive on a category or a product, from a search for a material, a colour or a room. The brands ranking well treat those pages as the shopfront: real copy, real answers, real internal links. The ones struggling have a beautiful homepage and category pages that are a grid and nothing else.
They photograph the thing in a home, not on a white background
White-background product shots are necessary and they sell nothing. The brands with momentum show the object in a room, at the scale it will actually occupy, because the question a homewares buyer is silently asking is not "is this nice" but "will this look right in mine".
A note to the brands on this list
If we have a detail wrong, tell us and it is fixed the same day. If you would like to be added, email us with your site. And if you would rather not be listed at all, say so and we will remove you without argument.
Questions owners ask
How were these brands chosen?
Every brand on this list was opened and read on its own website before it was included. Nothing was taken from another list, a directory or a search result. If a fact could not be confirmed on the brand's own site, the brand was left off rather than guessed at, and several were.
Did anyone pay to be included?
No. Nobody paid, nobody was asked to pay, and nothing on this page is affiliate linked. We publish it because Australian homewares is a category we work in and the independents in it deserve to be found in one place.
Why are the big chains missing?
Because they are easy to find already. This list is for founder-led and independent brands, most of which are competing against those chains with a fraction of the budget.
My brand should be on this list. Can you add it?
Email info@sellevate.com.au with your website. The only requirements are that you are Australian, you sell online, and the detail we write about you can be verified on your own site. We update the list as we go.
Is something wrong in my entry?
Tell us and we will fix it the same day. Everything here was read from your own site, but sites change and we would rather be corrected than be wrong.
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