Build Beautiful

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments!
Introduction
  Somewhere along the way, ambition began to look like a larger studio, a bigger team, a longer list of projects. Simone Mathews, founder of Soul Home, decided to walk the other way. Alongside her builder husband Ben, she's quietly built one of Australia's most interesting design and development practices, including Soul of Gerringong, The Bower and The Pause.
 
 In This Episode, We Explore:
 * Why she rejects "balance" in favour of shifting priorities
 * Her accidental first job at 19 as PA to Rodney Adler
 * The unplanned path from marketing to real estate to interior design
 * The story behind Soul of Gerringong
 * Building brand partnerships on authenticity, not free products
 * Her design philosophy: creating a "holiday feeling" at home
 * Straddling developer and designer roles without losing herself
 * Why she deliberately shrank her studio instead of scaling it
 
Why This Conversation Matters
  Most business stories celebrate growth for its own sake. Simone's challenges that quietly and convincingly, choosing energy over empire, and proving that a smaller, more intentional business can be the more successful one.
 
 About Simone
  Simone Mathews is the founder of Soul Home, an interior designer, property developer and mother of four. Alongside her builder husband Ben, she has built one of Australia's most distinctive design and development practices, including Soul of Gerringong, The Bower and The Pause.
 
 🎧 Listen to the full episode now. 
 
 Follow @buildbeautiful_podcast for a new conversation every fortnight.
 
 Proudly supported by Tappeti Fine Hand-Crafted Rugs.

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!
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.
 
🎧 Listen to the full episode now.
 
Proudly supported by Tappeti Fine Hand-Crafted Rugs.
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!
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.

Proudly supported by Tappeti Fine Hand-Crafted Rugs
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!
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.

🎧 Listen to the full episode now.
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!
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.