Welcome to Stonnington
Welcome to The Weekend in the City of Stonnington.
Start Saturday with a bang with a good breakfast, the most important meal of the day! In Armadale, local favourites include Moby or Nine Yards on High Street, or Mammoth on Malvern Road. Once fuelled up, start touring at Northbrook, a nineteenth-century Victorian Italianate villa that’s now home to the Stonnington History Centre. Explore the building and archive rooms via a self-guided tour.
Drop into Firestation Print Studio, a short six-minute walk away. Explore the main studio and see demonstrations of printmaking techniques such as etching, linocut, collagraph and monoprint. In the back room, you can even try out letterpress and gel plate printing yourself!
The Life of Yarra Walking Tour
Walk down Glenferrie Road, where you can browse the shops. Or, if you’re already hungry, there are plenty of bakeries to sample like Little Sister, Glick’s, Woodfrog Bakery or Fleischer Cakes. Pick up a picnic lunch and take the tram to Central Park.
This 19-acre park is home to the Central Park Conservatory, one of the oldest conservatories in Victoria. If you’ve finished your lunch, you can take a guided tour to learn about the building’s history and its specialty: rare orchids. The heritage-listed conservatory is rarely open to the public, so enjoy this opportunity!
Take the kids to Central Park playground afterwards, or walk through the park to Hedgeley Dene Gardens. Loop back, or head over to Korowa Girls’ School, where there will be presentations from the architect and student-led tours of the state-of-the-art Roslyn Otzen Sports and Wellbeing Centre facility.
You can also head over to Como House and Gardens. Wander at your leisure through this pleasant, atmospheric town mansion built in 1847, and enjoy the landscaped gardens.
On Sunday, travel to Chapel Street to explore Prahran and South Yarra. Start at South Yarra Library, where you can join a From River Punts to Skyscrapers tour down Toorak Road to learn about the suburb’s recent history and heritage.
Explore the recently reopened South Yarra Siding Reserve. Reopened last year after renovations for the Metro Tunnel project, the reserve now features more than 10,000 native plants and 100 new trees. You can also see two First Nations artworks by Barkindji man Kent Morris and Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Kim Wandin with Christine Joy.
For more public art, on Arthur Street you’ll find a mural by David “MEGGS” Hooke and ‘Pot Plants’ by Tom Gerrard on Chapel Street, just two of many more works in Stonnington’s public mural wall crawl.
Then, it’s time to get your skate on—via Prahran Skate Park, that is! Located at Princes Gardens, the park has turned a previously underused site into a community hub for skateboarding and basketball. In an exclusive event held just for Open House Melbourne 2025, come join a guided tour to hear about how the City of Stonnington and world-renowned skate park architects Convic envisioned the space.
Then, see the space put to the test as some of Australia’s best young local vert skateboarders defy gravity in the skate demonstrations. Keen to have a go? Kids are in luck—there will be free beginners skateboarding classes with Prahran local, former World Cup champion and Paris Olympics Head Judge Renton Millar.
If artsy Sundays are more your style, discover the hidden gems at Duldig Studio Museum in Malvern, and get an insight into Melbourne’s unique artistic and social history from the 1920s to 1980s.
There’s always something new to see on this side of the Yarra! Keep up to date with the City of Stonnington’s What’s On page.
