Sculpted in White and Black: The Mayfair Story

A Collaboration Between Zaha Hadid Architects, LX Hausys HIMACS, and Luxx Newhouse Group

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The Centrepiece

At the heart of this exhibition stand three sculptural forms — a curved kitchen island, a fireplace seat, and an integrated vanity with sink — each carved from LX Hausys HIMACS acrylic solid surface and brought to life by the fabricators at Luxx Newhouse Group. Together they form a single continuous language of line and curve: one in luminous white, one in obsidian black, each engineered without a single visible seam.

These are not props. They are full-scale, fully functional pieces created for UEM Sunrise's Mayfair condominium project in Melbourne, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in partnership with Australian firm Elenberg Fraser. What visitors are seeing is a genuine fragment of the building — the kitchen counter a resident will lean against, the fireplace bench they will sit beside, the vanity they will stand over each morning — released from its architectural context and placed here as an object of contemplation in its own right.

From Melbourne to the Region

The Mayfair collaboration first travelled to audiences beyond the building site in 2017, when UEM Sunrise partnered with Zaha Hadid Architects to present the exhibition Zaha Hadid Architects: Reimagining Architecture as part of the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival. Held at the White Box in Kuala Lumpur's Publika, the show traced the practice's four decades of work, and it was there — beside sketches, models, and the studio's most iconic projects — that these very Mayfair furniture pieces made their public debut, with Principal Patrik Schumacher present at the opening.

Following its Kuala Lumpur premiere, the exhibition moved on to Singapore, where it was staged at Marina Bay Sands' ArtScience Museum. There, the Mayfair project was singled out as the star of the show — the residential tower designed for a Melbourne site by Zaha Hadid Architects and Elenberg Fraser, with the fireplace seat and kitchen island once again on display for Singaporean audiences, drawing design press and even a visit from Tengku Zatashah of the Selangor royal family, who was photographed seated on the very fireplace bench featured here.

The exhibition was presented in Singapore in conjunction with Luxx Newhouse Group — the same fabricator responsible for translating Zaha Hadid Architects' free-flowing forms in HIMACS into the precise, seamless pieces on display today. From Kuala Lumpur, to Singapore's ArtScience Museum, and now to this presentation, the same white kitchen counter and black fireplace bench have carried the Mayfair story across the region — each stop adding another chapter before the pieces finally take their place inside the completed building in Melbourne.

The Material: HIMACS

None of this would hold its shape without HIMACS, LX Hausys' acrylic solid surface. It is the material that allows Zaha Hadid Architects' architecture to keep flowing indoors — no timber joinery, no applied countertop, no visible junction between wall, worktop, and vanity. HIMACS is thermoformed, so it can be heated and bent into the sweeping, continuous curves that define both the kitchen island's white counter and the fireplace bench's black shell. It is also non-porous and seamlessly joinable, meaning the integrated sink and vanity basin are grown out of the same solid mass as the surrounding surface rather than dropped into a cut-out — a detail that reads, up close, as one continuous piece of poured stone rather than fabricated furniture.

The Fabricator: Luxx Newhouse Group

Translating a Zaha Hadid Architects drawing into a physical, load-bearing, liveable object is where Luxx Newhouse Group's craft comes in. Every compound curve on the kitchen island, every mitred return on the fireplace surround, and every basin lip on the vanity was thermoformed, bonded, and hand-finished to a tolerance that leaves no visible seam anywhere across the piece — a technical discipline that sits quietly behind the architecture's apparent effortlessness. It is this fabrication work that has allowed the same Mayfair pieces to be dismantled, shipped, and rebuilt intact across three cities and three exhibitions, without losing the precision of their original form.

Why It's Here

This exhibition brings that journey full circle. The same kitchen island that stood in Kuala Lumpur's White Box and Singapore's ArtScience Museum stands here again — not as a replica, but as the very furniture destined for Mayfair's Melbourne residences. It is a rare chance to see, up close and touchable, the point where an architect's vision, an advanced material, and a fabricator's hands meet to become something a family will live with every day.

Zaha Hadid Architects — Design LX Hausys HIMACS — Acrylic Solid Surface Luxx Newhouse Group — Fabrication UEM Sunrise — Mayfair, Melbourne