Walking into Lost in Books is a little like walking into a daydream. Models of hot air balloons float near a ceiling covered in billowing white fabric. Bookshelves line one wall, murals adorn another. The gently sloping floor is carpeted in bright colours. A pile of cushions and soft toys is heaped in a corner beside some armchairs and a piano sits opposite. It’s a stark contrast to the hot concrete and brick of the Fairfield street on which it sits.

The multilingual children’s bookstore is the only one of its kind in the western Sydney suburb – the only bookstore, that is. The area hasn’t had a bookshop at all since Angus and Robertson turned its back on bricks-and-mortar outlets, and Kmart aside, the closest storefronts dedicated to all things literary are over in Parramatta.

Lost in Books isn’t just an anomaly for the area, it’s an outlet with a very specific purpose. It developed out of an outreach literacy project that community development agency Think + Do Tank Foundation began in western Sydney in late 2013. Jane Stratton, the foundation’s creative director, says she wanted to work in the community and experiment with different ways of structuring that relationship. But when she was invited to curate an exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse, it became clear to her that the foundation’s prerogative was bigger than art itself.

“I wanted to see whether the arts, which are sort of a temporary way of feeling how things could be different or otherwise, could become a more permanent feature of life,” Stratton says.

Language diversity is at the core of Lost In Books. A majority of Fairfield residents – 59.4% – were born in a country other than Australia, and 75.2% speak a language other than English at home. The area’s multicultural demographics are partly a consequence of the fact that it has resettled some 12,000 refugees over the past five years, including a large proportion from Iraq and Syria accepted as part of the Australian government’s additional settlement program in 2016.

When we visit the store early one Tuesday morning, manager Yvonne Lam is preparing for coffee and conversation at 10am – a regular weekly community learning session, targeted at local Arabic-speaking women. The bookshop is around the corner from Navitas, where many of the Fairfield community learn English. Between vacuuming and putting out jars of cookies, Lam says: “We wanted to create an opportunity for women who want to apply their English in a practical but social and casual setting. No blackboard, no textbook.”

A collection of demountable tables and chairs sits near the window display. This is where the coffee and conversation will take place, run by Lost in Books’ Arabic-speaking community liaison, Afaf Al-Shammari. It’s also where they run many of their other weekly programs, which include textiles workshops and painting. The store’s activity program runs with the assistance of an array of volunteers, many of them school leavers and young locals excited by the social aspect of the bookstore and looking for experience that will help them in the jobs market.

The store stocks children’s books in languages from Arabic to Vietnamese, including Hindi, Karen, Russian, Somali and a selection of Indigenous Australian languages. Stock is limited – the bookstore only opened its doors in July last year – but it’s growing steadily.

While English proficiency in new migrants is regularly the subject of political dog-whistling, there is far less public focus on the maintenance of mother languages, and less still on the benefits to children of speaking a second language at home and what it might mean to grow up being proficient in their parents’ mother tongue – or the alienation involved in losing that language.

“The loss of language is a loss of so much more. It’s [loss of] an identity and a means of being loved, of being in the world,” says Stratton. She believes it’s shortsighted of Australia not to recognise that the the huge diversity in spoken languages across the country in migrant and Indigenous communities is a valuable resource just waiting to be tapped.

The primary demographic for Lost in Books is women and children, initially by accident rather than design – “We were working a lot with women because we found that women were the ones that turned up,” Stratton says – but it has also filled a yawning gulf in the Fairfield community for women’s spaces. The area immediately surrounding Lost in Books is very male-oriented, with many of the cafes frequented mainly by local men who sit, play dominoes, and bet under the table. They’re not places that women feel comfortable lingering.

It’s one of the reasons Lost in Books is already so important to the local community. Women – particularly refugee and migrant women – are disproportionately affected by things like lack of public transport, distance from amenities, overburdened social services and even the language barrier, due to caring responsibilities, says Stratton. “Social isolation creeps in and it becomes difficult for people to become connected to the services they need.”

The other reason is the business model. Lost in Books is a social enterprise structured around a principle of accessibility – a place for people to access books in their own language “without feeling shamed, without having money to spend”. It’s not a library, but price points are deliberately low and there’s a wide range of secondhand stock for people to read in-store. Currently, it’s supported by project funding from the now-defunct Catalyst and Multicultural NSW, among others, but they hope to eventually extend into books for adults, too, and become self-sufficient through the online retail arm of the project.

And people are buying the books. “Family trips overseas often involve stocking up on books [in languages other than English] that are then distributed through the community,” Stratton says. “If that’s happening, then publishers, booksellers, need to understand that there is a real market for that.”

As well as selling multilingual books, Lost in Books is also contributing to their creation, running artist residency programs based around storytelling for children in languages other than English. Two residencies have already been completed; current projects include a pair of Indigenous writers working on a children’s book in Dharug, and a collaborative novella by Arabic-speaking high school girls.

The artist residencies feed into the bookstore’s first festival, In Other Words, a free family-friendly event running this weekend to coincide with Unesco’s International Day of Mother Language. The festival includes music, poetry, films, discussion panels and more – all oriented around a celebration of linguistic diversity.

“How amazing if Australia could become more of a polyglot society, not just a multicultural society, but a society where people speak more than one language and can be understood on those terms?” says Stratton. “Because it’s not English that you hear on the streets here, and that shouldn’t be a problem – that’s a huge asset.”

• In Other Words festival runs on 23 and 24 February at Lost in Books, Fairfield, Sydney