For six days in September, an apartment in Surry Hills brought contemporary art, collectible design and objects into the rooms of everyday life. Paintings shared space with sculptural furniture, lighting and leather bags.

Curated by Emma Elizabeth and Cassandra Bird, HŌLUS BŌLUS took place at The Second from 2–7 September 2026, as part of the Sydney Contemporary Offsite Program. Its name means “all at once”: an apt invitation to discover the works together.

Three Over Six supplied Louis Vuitton Vivienne, Gaston and Petula pieces for the exhibition. Among the larger works, the characters introduced a small, playful cast.

The Second occupies a whole-floor loft in the century-old Edwards & Co. Ltd Tea Merchants building, converted by Iain Halliday of BKH. Five-metre ceilings, tall windows and timber floors gave the exhibition an expansive setting.

Emma Elizabeth and Cassandra Bird worked with the views between rooms. A colour glimpsed through a doorway could find an echo nearby; light moved over glass, metal and leather through the day.

Bird’s relationships with contemporary artists met Elizabeth’s practice across design, interiors and exhibitions. The arrangements developed through placing works together and responding to the rooms.

Adam Goodrum’s Big Talk armchair made colour architectural, its rounded back and cylindrical base wrapped in bands of upholstery. Nearby, his yellow Billo seating for nau offered a softer place to settle.

Annalisa Ferraris’s Claudio chairs carried covers painted by Dan Kyle. Painting followed the sloping surfaces of something made to be lived with.

Ash Allen’s lemon-yellow Beanless chair approached comfort through an open mesh structure. With A-ESQUE bags resting against its lattice, leather and metal met in two very different kinds of intricate construction.

Anna Varendorff’s red Almost Circle vase for ACV Studio rested on Dean Norton’s dichroic-glass Mood side table. A near-complete loop met a surface that changed with the light.

Jon Goulder’s Crawford console brought a measured timber line beneath an artwork. Emma Elizabeth’s Fire Sovereign rug for Designer Rugs spread red and green across the floor, extending the arrangement beneath visitors’ feet.

The catalogue also included Ross Gardam’s Relic table lamp and Tom Fereday’s cast-aluminium Cor Light 925. Lighting joined the furniture and objects as work to encounter in its own right.

Vivienne, Gaston and Petula give Louis Vuitton’s familiar motifs faces, costumes and imagined lives. At The Second, some gathered within Skeehan Studio’s What We Keep cabinet, framed by teal, timber and textured glass.

In the living room, Petula Mini Skater and Vivienne Snorkeling stood on Rina Bernabei’s Sidse coffee table. Its mirrored stainless-steel top doubled their pink and blue forms above a gathered goat-leather pouch.

Placed within a domestic setting, the figures had room to be encountered as individual objects—with a little humour in their presence.

A-ESQUE’s The Bag in Braid carried leather into another form. Developed over eighteen months in the Melbourne atelier, the presentation comprised twenty-four individually braided bags.

Hundreds of strips were cut, skived and worked by hand. Loops, knots and fringe gave the surfaces volume and movement, their colours finding echoes in upholstery and artwork.

Resting within the rooms, the bags held their own as objects of texture and silhouette, with the possibility of being carried still close by.

Janet Laurence, Paul Davies and Shilo Engelbrecht were among the artists whose works gave the rooms their character. Furniture, lighting and vessels carried the exhibition from the walls into the space of daily life.

“I wanted them to look first,” Elizabeth said in the exhibition statement.

That invitation lasted beyond a first impression. A different doorway, a change in daylight or a second look could bring another work forward. HŌLUS BŌLUS gave collecting a generous, lived setting.