Butterfly Room, Winner of 2020 National Trust Heritage Award

It's been a very challenging year of droughts, fires and COVID... despite this...I haven’t been able to hold myself and an amazing team of conservators back.

 Recently, I received word that one of most gruelling, challenging and favourite projects has won an amazing award - the National Trust Heritage Awards for the ‘Conservation of Interiors’ supported by the NSW Government through the Heritage Council of NSW.

This award was won for the conservation work we did on the ‘Butterfly Room’ at the State Theatre based in Sydney, CBD.  

This project was many years in the making and took nearly a year to complete from start to finish.

I had the honour of bringing this project to life with the passionate Mark Harris (GM, State Theatre) and Johnathan Bryant (Heritage Architect/Director) of Urbis who’s love of the historic theatre and preserving it for future generations humbled me deeply. 

What even is the Butterfly Room?

Back in the 1920’s the ‘Butterfly Room’ as the name may imply was an entire room dedicated to butterflies and their beauty. The antechamber before the ladies restrooms was beautiful, colourful and full of joy. The room itself was painted with magical cloud shaped windows with amazing scenes of butterflies in flight.

However, soon after the Great Depression hit, these paintings were painted over with a lifeless, flat, hard grey paint, the surface was sanded back and prepared well to try and erase these beautiful butterflies from history. 

Who knows why this happened, perhaps the opulence? Perhaps the joy and the beauty was in too stark a contrast against the difficulties people were experiencing at the time. Be that as it may, the murals remained hidden and damaged for over 80 years.

When I first saw the room (back in 2005) there had been an attempt in the 80’s to recapture some of the original magic - butterfly wallpaper had been used to fill in the windows. 

It took the combined expertise and unique skill sets of myself and a team of specialist conservators including Matteo Volonte, Arek Werstak, Oliver Hull, Jennifer O’Connell, Jochen Letsch, Eden Chrsitian, Suati Rojas, Anna Diakowska, Lisa Sharp, Annick Vuissoz, Rob Williams, Amy Jackson, Robyn Ho, Claire Heasman, Meredith Lynch, Julia Mauney Van den Burg, Karina Acton and Wendi Powell to uncover them and bring them back to life.

The work was challenging and at times grueling. 

New materials, solvent gels and mechanical techniques had to be developed specifically for this job in order to remove the rock hard paint layers, whilst preserving and uncovering the magnificent butterflies that lay beneath.

 The project took close to a year to complete and, as the murals were revealed one by one (very slowly) I felt excited and at times even had butterflies in my stomach as the project neared completion! 

I could see how far we had come. It was a hard fought project, and an award well earned by everyone involved.

I am deeply grateful for the amazing opportunity to work with such wonderful people, lead the conservation of this project, use world-class techniques and together be recognised for achieving such amazing results for this iconic Australian Theatre.