Inner Space is a mind blowingly, densely packed yet very cool furniture is located in Leura, New South wales. It’s definitely worth a visit if only to ooh and awh over the merchandise (some of which you might even consider shipping home) which is spread through three rooms — although it’s probably best to leave the kids outside.

Leura is the town that essentially adjoins Katoomba while also being geographically distinct from it, because of how the cliffs of how Australia’s “Grand Canyon” are arranged. Leura, like Katoomba, essentially rolls up its sidewalks at 5pm, but in my opinion it does have better/trendier shopping along with some decent restaurants that supplements what Katoomba offers (Katoomba has a Korean restaurant, Leura has Greek one, etc) — and as such is worth a visit.

That said, it’s also part of any of the hop-on/hop-off bus tickets you might purchase, so you can organize your visit to drop you off here at the end of the day and then grab a taxi, or take the train to take you back after dinner (the busses stop running at about 4:30).

While in this store I met a woman with incredible personal style, who said that Katoomba and this Leura are where all the hipsters from the Newtown neighborhood in Sydney are moving, because they could no longer afford to live in Newtown — a population that apparently included herself and her girlfriend. She also said she has to AVOID coming into this shop because she goes a little purchase crazy while there… not that I blame her.

That said, while there are some smaller/light items for sale in the shop, for those of us who aren’t in any way locals, and have to worry about what will size/weight fit into our suitcases, a store like this can give you ideas of what to google search for later. (Very little of their merchandise was produced by local artists.)

For instance, I did some serious drooling over those decorative animal heads on the walls which were in my opinion amazingly cheap at $269… only to learn upon getting home that Amazon was selling something similar for about the same price. Amazon happily is only acting as a portal for this company, with it’s own online site; where I learned these are items commonly found/produced in Indonesia… so I then googled “Indonesia carved skulls”, and found this shop, and this one, etc.  ALL of that said…  the prices at this shop WERE about the same prices I’m seeing on line when you add in shipping; so, if I were living in Australia, I’d be going a little purchase crazy in this shop …  especially since all the prices are competitive with on line sources (once you factor in shipping costs), with the added advantage of you’ll know exactly what your buying while with an on line purchase you can never be exactly sure…. especially with hand carved items like these