Reverie Archive started over a coffee in Erskineville. I was staring at an old map of Alexandria hanging on a wall in a cafe. The map long predated the warehouses that now populate the suburb. It showed the swamp, on which much of Alexandria was built. Though I had lived there for a long time, the features the map showed were new to me and gave me an insight into the history of the neighbourhood. It helped me better appreciate the streets I walked every day.
A week or so later in a restaurant in the same area, I saw a canvas reproduction of a historic photograph of the very street the building sat on. Long before the pavement, trees and parks that adorn this street now, it was an era of horse-drawn carts and timber shopfronts. Looking at the photograph and then out the window, I could barely reconcile the two — but something in the shape of the road was unmistakably familiar.
When I asked the business owners about this art, they struggled to remember how they came to acquire them. They said they'd be interested in having more, but didn't have the first clue about where they could find them, especially anything localised to their own street or suburb.
The more I looked, the more I saw the same story — in cafes, pubs, living rooms. People want to see the history of the places they love, but the archives holding millions of these images are vast and difficult to navigate, never really designed for someone who just wants to find what their street looked like in 1920.
Reverie Archive was born from this gap. I organise historical photographs, paintings and maps at a street level — catalogued by location and era — so that finding the history of your neighbourhood is as simple as searching for it. Every piece is available as a museum-quality print, framed or unframed, delivered to your door.