Beauty meets decay: Melbourne street artist Rone breathes new life into condemned house

Melbourne is busy growing, razing old houses and factories and throwing up apartment towers for the almost 2,000 new residents the state gets each week.

Change is happening so fast there’s barely time to mourn what’s lost.

My Uber drives down a street in Alphington down by the Yarra, 7km from the CBD. This is prime real estate; each side of the street is lined with churned earth and brand-new boxes of flats, until we get to the end where the dozers haven’t started yet. We pull up outside an old-fashioned bowls club and a falling down weatherboard house.

The house is marked for demolition, but inside is a time capsule to mid-century Australiana: swan doilies and an orange crockpot, chenille bedspreads, the three-bar heater; a crystal cabinet and dining room where no one ever sits, and a corner piano and densely patterned brown carpet.

Throughout the interior are enormous portraits of a young woman – she’s climbing the walls, looming over each room of the abandoned house like a ghost, her expression ambiguous.
The work is called the Omega Project, and it’s by much-loved Melbourne street artist Rone. Commissioned by the developer to paint the inside of the condemned house, his signature Jane Doe women stare into the middle distance as you walk through the halls and into the bedrooms. Rone also recruited set designer Carly Spooner to decorate the house, turning it into something resembling a movie set or stage.

‘I'd be crushed if this was gone before anyone got to see it': Rone's Omega House – in pictures
View gallery
Rone is evoking a mood, a sort of dark nostalgia. The house is in decay, there’s mildew across the ceiling and walls; plaster is falling in, the carpet is mouldy, plates have been smashed and their pieces lie uncollected on the ground. This will all be destroyed when it’s demolished by the end of the month. The woman on the walls seems apprehensive.

Rone tells Guardian Australia that he imagines this was Doe’s childhood bedroom and it has been left intact – down to the coral ornament, the hair curlers, the music box. “She’s grown up and left but her bedroom is unchanged, exactly the way it was when she was a girl.”

The vibe is Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides, or a more sinister version of a Wes Anderson set.