Photo by Benny Capp from his 2021 exhibition showcasing Australia’s best set designers, decorators, and curators in Film and Television. The participating artists were asked to create sets that reflected their personalities and lifestyles. All sets were built and photographed at All Time Studios during a time when many subjects faced a significant reduction in work due to COVID-19 restrictions. Visit unscenesets.com to see the rest of the stunning sets and their creators!
About
Victoria McKenzie is a New Zealand–born set decorator and spatial designer. Currently she is based in Melbourne.
Victoria’s work explores the quiet power of atmosphere—how spaces can seduce, unsettle, and tell stories before a single word is spoken.
With over 25 years’ experience across film and television in Australia and New Zealand, Victoria has shaped environments that are as emotionally resonant as they are visually precise.
Her career began as head of set dressing on the blockbusting The Lord of the Rings – this experience cemented her instinct for world-building at scale and with nuance. Other productions included Judy and Punch, Cut Snake, and Oddball, as well as television series including Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Get Krack!n, Mrs Biggs, Molly, and Olivia Newton-John: Hopelessly Devoted to You. Most recently, she completed the Apple TV series The Dispatcher. Victoria also has worked as an art director across more than 40 television commercials, drawn to the wham-bam, highly inventive scale of that world—where ideas must land instantly, and environments are distilled to their most potent, expressive form.
Inspired by an early school exchange to Upstate New York, Victoria then trained in design at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. Victoria works from a deeply material understanding of the world. Her background in weaving, woodworking, dyeing, printmaking, pottery, and bronze casting informs a practice that is both intuitive and exacting—equally comfortable in the language of artisans as it is on a film set.
In New Zealand, Victoria was an early designer-driver of the women’s underwear label Thunderpants – a brand still thriving over 30 years later. Its ‘they won’t go up your bum!’ byline has enduring cult appeal.
A passionate advocate for mid-20th century modern architecture and design, Victoria has spent the past 15 years creating self-guided tours across Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle, and Hobart, as well as Palm Springs and Los Angeles—researching architects, mapping suburbs, and celebrating the optimism and clarity of that era.
Now also a garden designer, Victoria treats her home and garden as evolving works in themselves—immersive and layered environments where art, landscape, and narrative intersect. These spaces act as a testing ground for ideas. Part sanctuary, part stage, and a direct extension of her creative practice.
If there’s ever an appetite for compelling conversation around space, story, and the emotional charge of objects, Victoria is delighted to step into that dialogue.
Article by Shelby Deering from American Fleamarket Magazine. Photographs by Kate Hansen. 2019
