Diana Luxton Messara: public interior designer

When we think about interior design, we tend to imagine domestic spaces, but this fascinating archive reveals the role played by an interior designer in conceiving the interiors of public buildings.

Most interior design material in the Caroline Simpson Library relates to houses and apartments, and sometimes commercial spaces like restaurants, offices or shops. But every public building also requires careful interior planning: someone has to decide on the layout, colours, finishes, furniture, lighting and materials that will shape how people experience a space. In the 20th century, interior design emerged as a professional discipline closely integrated with architecture, and designers increasingly contributed to major civic and public works projects.

One Australian designer whose career clearly illustrates this shift is Diana Luxton Messara, whose work has focused almost entirely on the interiors of public buildings – including hospitals, courts, airports, government offices, schools, prisons and even a power plant. Her archive, held by the Caroline Simpson Library, offers a rare and detailed cross-section of the development of interior design as a profession in Australia.

The Diana Luxton Messara archive, generously donated by the designer herself, contains drawings, plans, textile designs, photographs, correspondence, publications, sample boards and personal papers spanning more than five decades. Together, these materials document a career that started in textile design and expanded to include commercial interiors and ultimately some of NSW’s largest public projects.

Starting out

Luxton trained at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), completing a Diploma of Interior Design between 1954 and 1958. This specialist tertiary training reflected the growing professionalisation of interior design during the mid-20th century, as the field moved beyond ideas of decoration and increasingly positioned itself as a technical and research-based design discipline. While still a student, she won the 1957 Commonwealth Award for Textile Design. In 1958, she and other RMIT students established the professional association the Industrial Design Institute of Australia – now part of the Design Institute of Australia.

Early roles with Melbourne firms Stephenson & Turner, and Buchan, Laird & Buchan exposed Luxton to large-scale commercial interiors, including work on the Australian headquarters of international firms Shell and Caterpillar. A formative period in London from 1964 to 1967 further expanded her experience, working on airports and university buildings with Sir Basil Spence Architects and Yorke Rosenberg Mardall. This international work prepared her for one of the defining projects of her career: the interiors of the Sydney Opera House.

Fitting out the Sydney Opera House

After returning to Australia in 1967, Luxton worked with Hall, Todd & Littlemore Architects under Peter Hall and became the interior designer in charge of key aspects of the Sydney Opera House interiors – a vast project completed in 1973, and a key moment in Luxton’s career. Her work included seating, foyers, dressing rooms, catering facilities and box offices – spaces that continue to shape the experience of audiences and performers today. The archive now in the Caroline Simpson Library Collection preserves fabric and weave testers, folios, plans, correspondence and press clippings that reveal both the practical complexity and symbolic significance of designing interiors for one of the world’s most recognisable buildings.

The press coverage surrounding the Opera House project also reveals another dimension of Luxton’s career: her visibility as a woman working within the heavily male-dominated world of major public construction. Surrounded by architects, engineers, project managers and construction workers – professions overwhelmingly occupied by men at the time – Luxton was frequently singled out in newspaper articles as one of the few women on site. These articles routinely describe Luxton in terms of her gender, age and appearance, for example as ‘a 32-year-old woman interior designer’ in the article ‘Woman’s touch at the Opera House’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1968); ‘a happy, attractive girl who looks about 22 – although she says she’s 32’ in the article ‘Decorative, too: Diana’s designs are top secret’ (The Daily Telegraph, c1968); and ‘a slender, guitar-playing young lady … large-eyed and attractive’ in the article ‘Our girl at Opera House’ (The Sun, 9 May 1968). One article, ‘Touching up the Sydney Opera House’ (publication and date unknown), gushes: ‘she has an office on the site, and … wears her helmet the way one expects a countess to bear a tiara’. In dramatising the contrast between her fashionable appearance and the vast industrial landscape of the unfinished Opera House, journalists reflected broader cultural assumptions about women in professional design roles during the period. 

From 1973 to 1986, Luxton Messara (she added her husband’s surname, Messara, to her professional name after their marriage) ran her own practice while providing extensive consulting services to the NSW Department of Public Works, whose interiors division employed professional designers to plan public buildings across the state. Her projects during this period included courts in Albury, Orange and Port Macquarie, ministerial offices and departmental fit-outs. These projects demonstrate the expanding role of interior designers in government and civic architecture during the late 20th century, when interiors were increasingly understood as integrated components of larger architectural schemes.

Design for health

In 1988, Luxton Messara was appointed Senior Interior Designer for Health with the NSW Department of Public Works and Services, a role she held until 1999. The archive richly documents this period, particularly her work on John Hunter Hospital and Nepean Hospital. Plans, renderings, sample boards and promotional material reveal her holistic approach to healthcare design, which integrated architecture, colour, art and material finishes to improve patient wellbeing and staff experience.

Luxton Messara believed strongly in the therapeutic potential of interiors. At John Hunter Hospital she incorporated stained glass, terrazzo floor inlays and botanical friezes into the building’s design, demonstrating her conviction that colour, light and imagery could positively influence healthcare environments. Her publications and research papers, including Healthcare manual of light, colour and texture in health care buildings (commissioned by the NSW Department of Health in 1994, and manuscript held by the Caroline Simpson Library as part of the archive), reflected a growing international interest in evidence-based design – an approach that connected interior environments with measurable outcomes such as healing, learning and wellbeing.

This emphasis on research and functionality marked an important shift within the profession during the mid- to late 20th century. Interior design increasingly positioned itself not simply as decoration, but as a technical and interdisciplinary practice informed by psychology, ergonomics and environmental research. Luxton Messara’s archive captures this transition in detail through project documentation, teaching notes, design guidelines and publications.

An evolving practice

Alongside her professional practice, Luxton Messara taught architectural drafting, interior planning and design – among other subjects – at technical colleges across Sydney from the 1970s through to the 1980s, helping to shape a new generation of designers. Committed to ongoing professional development throughout her career, she continually expanded her expertise through further training in areas including project management and computer-aided design (CAD), adapting to new technologies and evolving industry practices.

At the same time, certain aspects of her design approach remained remarkably consistent. Textile designs, drawings and graphic works preserved in the archive reveal clear continuities between her early training in textile design and her later public interiors, particularly in her sophisticated understanding of pattern, surface and colour.

Taken together, the Diana Luxton Messara Archive represents one thread in the evolution of interior design in Australia across the second half of the 20th century. It documents the emergence of public interior design as a specialised field, the integration of interiors within major architectural projects, and the growing professional opportunities available to women designers – even within industries where they remained exceptions.

Most importantly, it reminds us that public interiors are designed environments that shape our everyday experiences. From courtrooms and hospitals to airports and cultural landmarks, Diana Luxton Messara’s work helped define how generations of Australians moved through, worked within and experienced public space.