Adelaide’s New Museum Is Fine-Art Heaven

The David Roche Foundation House Museum in Adelaide is stuffed with treasures.

Culture-vultures rejoice! There’s a new reason to pack your bags for Adelaide. The David Roche Foundation House Museum opens this month, displaying more than 3000 decorative and fine-art pieces, some of them dating back to the early 1700s. Encompassing two centuries of European design and art movements, including French Rococo, the exhibits will be housed in the late art collector David Roche’s former home. Adelaide architecture and design studio Williams Burton Leopardi has transformed the Federation villa with a pitched roof and sandstone walls into a museum space and added a sleek new wing, purpose-built to accommodate Roche’s private collection. It’s a stunning juxtaposition of old and new on North Adelaide’s Melbourne Street but the real treasures await inside. Feast your eyes on Jean-Baptiste Santerre’s oil-on-canvas masterpiece, Adam and Eve, and François-Édouard Picot’s magnificent painting, Leda and the Swan (circa 1829).

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