Build Beautiful

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Introduction

There is a kind of artist whose career you can summarise in a paragraph: the school, the prize, the gallery, the rise. Antonia Perricone Mrljak is not that artist. She came to painting late, in her 40s, as a mother, after a first life as a fashion stylist. She walked into Sydney College of the Arts when most of her classmates were half her age, graduated with first class honours, and a year later stood in front of nine metres of blank canvas at Sydney Contemporary and painted, live, for the room. From there, the career people now recognise began.

In This Episode, We Explore:
* Growing up Sicilian-Australian in Sydney's western suburbs, and what it meant to be raised "not Australian"
* Rebelling through fashion as a teenager, and accidentally landing a career at David Jones
* Standing in a harbourside home at 16 and having no idea what a Picasso was
* The catalyst that led her back to study, wanting to be an example for her own children
* Painting nine metres of canvas with zero experience, and the clever trick that got her noticed
* Why she walked away from gallery relationships to work independently
* The fear of being "figured out," and how she talks herself through it
* Her biggest advice for any young artist: put everything in writing

Why This Conversation Matters

Most artist stories follow a familiar shape: talent discovered young, formal training, a steady climb. Antonia's story doesn't follow that shape at all, and that's exactly why it matters. She spent decades not knowing she was creative, mistaking her own instinct for something ordinary. Her path shows that reinvention has no age limit, and that the years spent surviving, adapting and quietly observing can become the very material an artist draws from later.

About Antonia
 
Antonia Perricone Mrljak is a Sydney-based painter. After a first career as a fashion stylist, she enrolled at Sydney College of the Arts in her late 40s, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours in 2018. The following year, she painted live across nine metres of canvas at Sydney Contemporary, a moment that launched her painting career. She has since exhibited independently across Australia and internationally, including with a gallery in Auckland.
 
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Introduction
There's a particular kind of honesty that's hard to find in any industry, the kind that looks at something widely admired and says plainly, this is not good enough.
This week on Build Beautiful, we're joined by Georgina Wilson, registered architect and founder of Georgina Wilson Associates. Once a ballet dancer and flutist, she found her way into architecture, spent a decade training under one of Australia's finest residential architects, and started her own practice after returning to Sydney during the global financial crisis. Three years ago, almost by accident, she posted a video questioning bad design, and woke up to 3 million views.

In This Episode, We Explore:
* Why she posted her first video where "none of her friends were on it"
* Why she calls her audience "normies," and means it as a compliment
* The mindset that got her past the fear of being seen: "it's gotta be bad before it's good"
* What most people misunderstand about designing a home they'll love living in
* Balancing a bespoke 1:1 practice with an audience of millions
* Why she's avoided the typical influencer monetisation model

Why This Conversation Matters
Most industries are full of beautiful photos and very little honesty. Georgina built her audience by doing the opposite. For anyone building a business, a practice, or a voice online, this conversation is a reminder that clarity and courage often matter more than credentials.

About Georgina
Georgina Wilson is a registered architect and founder of Georgina Wilson Associates (GWA), designing and renovating considered homes in Sydney for over 15 years, now followed by hundreds of thousands online for her honest, plain-spoken take on good design.

Listen to the full episode now.

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To get in touch with Build Beautiful or to follow us head to our socials: 
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on Facebook
on LinkedIn
If you'd like to be on the podcast, or want to collaborate with Build Beautiful feel free to contact us on buildbeautifulpodcast@gmail.com.

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments!
Every beautiful thing you've ever loved was iterated into existence. This week on Build Beautiful, we're joined by Grace Miller, Head of Failure & Experimentation at FlightStory, Steven Bartlett's media company behind The Diary of a CEO. She joined the team in January 2022, when it was just a handful of people around one table, and over four years helped grow it into a global operation followed by millions.
In This Episode, We Explore:
* What "Head of Failure & Experimentation" actually means
* The research behind failing well and psychological safety
* Why data sometimes overrides brand guidelines
* What it takes for a podcast to get backed by a major media company
* The mindset shift that came with leaving the Gold Coast for London
* Real lessons on ambition, sacrifice and self-doubt

Why This Conversation Matters
We rarely see the failed experiments behind a finished, polished brand. Grace's role exists to formalise something most industries avoid saying out loud: excellence is iterated into existence, and failing well is a craft worth taking seriously.

About Grace
Grace Miller is the girl who's paid to fail. She's Head of Failure & Experimentation at FlightStory, Steven Bartlett's media company behind The Diary of a CEO — a department she founded on a simple, uncomfortable idea: the fastest way to grow is to fail more often. Originally from the Gold Coast, Australia, she moved to London in 2022 as part of the founding team that grew Diary of a CEO to over 18 million subscribers in four years, alongside shows including We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson, Begin Again with Davina McCall, and Hot Smart Rich with Maggie Sellers Reum. She now leads innovation and testing across the entire FlightStory ecosystem.

With a background in marketing and social media in aviation, Grace moved into media and turned experimentation into a discipline — running more experiments, letting go of weak ideas quickly, and treating every failure as information. She's now one of the most distinctive voices on experimentation, failure, marketing and growth in the creator and podcasting world, with a LinkedIn community of over 27,000 people, and has spoken and advised organisations including YouTube, Red Bull, 1 Billion Followers Summit, SEMrush, and leading healthcare organisations.

Grace has since founded two businesses: Grace Experiments, her mission to shift how people and companies think toward an experimentation mindset through speaking, advisory work and content; and Experiment Media, where that thinking becomes action — helping people and companies test, learn, and grow.

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To get in touch with Build Beautiful or to follow us head to our socials: 
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If you'd like to be on the podcast, or want to collaborate with Build Beautiful feel free to contact us on buildbeautifulpodcast@gmail.com.

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments!
Yasmine Ghoniem's father left for Kuwait for what he said would be a couple of months. Seven months later, her mother still did not know if he was alive. He had arrived in Kuwait the day the Iraqis invaded. Yasmine was ten. Today, she is the founder and director of YSG Studio, was named Interior Designer of the Year 2025 by Vogue Living, and co-hosts ABC's Grand Designs Transformations.

This conversation goes somewhere most design podcasts do not. We talk about what it costs to build an award-winning practice while quietly building a family — including seven years of unexplained infertility before her daughter Sahara arrived. Yasmine's work is inseparable from her nomadic childhood across Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sydney, and she explains, for the first time, how that displacement became the foundation of everything she designs.

In this episode, we explore:
* Growing up mostly indoors in 50-degree heat, and how that shaped her relationship to light, materials, and a room's feeling
* Her father's seven months missing in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and the radio station her mother called for news of the missing
* Why the color of a childhood kitchen she hated still shows up in her work today
* Building "the Bible": the eight-pillar document she wrote so her team could learn what makes a project unmistakably hers
* Splitting from her sister's studio, Amber Road, and building YSG from scratch alongside her husband
* The performer who never left: dance, singing, an American Idol audition, and talking her way backstage at a choir she had no business joining
* Why YSG does zero marketing and treats Instagram as its website
* Seven years of unexplained infertility, and the dates she cannot explain — her studio's founding day and her daughter's birthday, worked out almost to the hour
* Hiring the final piece of her team, and finding out she was pregnant a month later
* What she wants her daughter Sahara to grow up knowing, and what "Build Beautiful" really means to her

Why this conversation matters
In an industry that markets glossy outcomes, Yasmine offers something rarer: an honest account of the private cost behind public success. Her story is a reminder that the most original creative work is rarely built on trend or formula — it comes from the specific, sometimes painful details of a life, translated into rooms other people get to live in.

About Yasmine
Yasmine Ghoniem is the founder and director of YSG Studio, the Sydney design practice she launched in February 2020 out of a former warehouse in Darlinghurst. Before YSG, she spent seven years running Amber Road with her sister, landscape architect Katy Svalbe. Born in Kuwait and raised between Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sydney, Yasmine studied visual communications before earning a scholarship to the Savannah College of Art and Design, then worked in architecture in Portland, Oregon. YSG's work has been recognised by Architectural Digest and Australia's leading design industry awards, and Yasmine was named Interior Designer of the Year 2025 by Vogue Living. She co-hosts ABC's Grand Designs Transformations alongside Anthony Burke.

Season 3 is proudly supported by @tappeti fine crafted rugs + carpets
To get in touch with Build Beautiful or to follow us head to our socials: 
 on Instagram
on Facebook
on LinkedIn
If you'd like to be on the podcast, or want to collaborate with Build Beautiful feel free to contact us on buildbeautifulpodcast@gmail.com.

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments!
The bank told Nicholas Karlovasitis they could not give him a business loan. No trading history. So he called back and told them he needed $30,000 for a pool party. An epic one. Just the once. They offered him $50,000. That was 18 years ago. Today, Design By Them — the studio Nicholas built with his co-founder Sarah Kay from a Newtown apartment — has a team of 35 and dealers across Dubai, the UK, the Netherlands, and the US. When their accountants recently asked about their exit strategy, Nicholas and Sarah walked out of the meeting laughing. They do not have one. They just really love what they do.

This conversation goes somewhere most design podcasts do not. We talk about what it means to be given the gift of choice — and what it costs to build a business that tries to pass that on to other people. Nicholas is the son of migrants who watched his mother count hours at a paper factory and his father work 16-hour days to pay off a home loan in four years. Everything he has built is quietly shaped by that. Including the royalty model that puts real money in the hands of Australian designers who have been treating their work as a side project for too long.

In this episode, we explore:
Growing up as a child of migrants and what that instilled — the optimism, the relativity, and the lifelong obsession with a better future
A conversation with his father in Year 7 that removed the burden of expectation and gave Nicholas the gift of choice
Deciding on industrial design at 13, and why passing up a Qantas avionics engineering programme was the best decision he almost did not make
Working school holidays at a paper factory with his mother — and the moment he understood what an hour of someone's labour was worth
The pool party loan: how Design By Them was founded on $30,000 a bank was happy to hand over for an epic one-time event
Building a furniture brand in a market that barely existed — and why 'if there's no industry for us, we'll create one' became the founding philosophy
The white t-shirt principle: the early business advice that shaped how they thought about products, cashflow, and creative ambition
The copied letterbox incident that sharpened their supply chain strategy and changed how they thought about protecting designers' work
The real economics of manufacturing locally versus overseas — and why the debate almost always misses the most important argument
Building a supply chain in China over five years, and what quality control actually looks like when you are doing it seriously
Running a business by designers for designers — and why they put prices on their website when no one else did
Exhibiting at 3 Days of Design Copenhagen and the patient, deliberate path to global reach
Why Nicholas and Sarah walked out of a meeting with their accountants laughing: no exit strategy, no Porsche, just the work

Why this conversation matters
In a world where scaling fast is celebrated and soul is usually the first casualty, Nicholas Karlovasitis offers a different model. Design By Them has grown from two people to 35 without losing what it set out to be: a brand that pays designers properly, builds for the long term, and believes that clarity of purpose is not a luxury — it is the strategy. His story is also a reminder that the most meaningful businesses are often built not to be sold, but to outlast the people who started them.

About Nicholas
Nicholas Karlovasitis is the co-founder and creative director of Design By Them, the Sydney-based furniture design studio he built alongside Sarah Kay from a Newtown apartment in 2007. He studied industrial design at UTS, where he also taught for a period, and has spent nearly two decades championing Australian designers while pursuing global reach. Design By Them manufactures across China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, the US, and Italy, operates a royalty model for the designers it represents, and is currently expanding into the UK, Netherlands, and US markets. Nicholas describes the business simply: it was built by designers, for designers. He still does not have an exit strategy.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED

Design By Them: designbythem.com
Instagram: @designbythem
3 Days of Design Copenhagen: 3daysofdesign.dk
To get in touch with Build Beautiful or to follow us head to our socials: 
 on Instagram
on Facebook
on LinkedIn
If you'd like to be on the podcast, or want to collaborate with Build Beautiful feel free to contact us on buildbeautifulpodcast@gmail.com.