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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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Proudly Supported by @tappeti fine crafted rugs + carpets
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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.

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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: 
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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!
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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If this episode resonated, please like, subscribe and share — it helps Build Beautiful continue to tell deeper stories from the world of design, architecture and creative life.

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: 
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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!
Your agent wants to sell. Your valuer wants the truth. And most people — designers, renovators, developers — never call the valuer. They call the agent, they trust the gut, they make decisions without one crucial piece of information: what will the market actually pay, with no skin in the game, before you've already spent the money. Belinda Botzolis has been the missing voice in that conversation for 17 years. She is done being missing.
Belinda Botzolis is the founding director of Add Value, a property valuation consultancy. She has inspected more than 15,000 Australian homes, assessed nearly $12 billion in real estate, and spent 17 years translating complex property and tax concepts into plain, actionable language — including the 2026 federal budget changes and the rarely-understood six-year capital gains tax rule.
This is a conversation for every designer, renovator, and developer who has ever made an expensive decision without a valuer in the room. About the ceiling on every property — the number the market won't cross regardless of how beautifully you design it. About demographic-led renovation strategy, the mistakes a bank valuer will never reward, and why the person with no stake in the outcome is sometimes the most important person you can have on your team.
In this episode, we explore:
Why every property has a ceiling — and why crossing it in renovation is one of the most common and costly mistakes homeowners and developers make
The demographic analysis Belinda runs before recommending any renovation: from kosher kitchens in Rose Bay to prayer rooms in Lakemba and courtyards in the inner west
The 2026 federal budget decoded: what actually changed for investors, what's grandfathered, what to hold off on, and why Belinda compares the policy to a school group assignment
How the property valuer fits inside the design team — and why most designers have never thought to include one
Flipping vs. forever home: why the design rules are completely different depending on your exit strategy
The budget blowout scenario: why a neutral valuer can sometimes say the things a designer can't — and why clients hear it differently from a third party
The six-year CGT principal place of residence rule — and why Belinda used it herself
Why the new negative gearing changes might make your primary home the most tax-efficient place to hold capital in the current landscape
Investment property renovation strategy: why neutral and durable beats trendy and cheap every time
Building a business on social media before going solo — and the grandmother story that explains her entire philosophy
Why this conversation matters
Property is where design and money converge. Most people make their biggest financial decisions without a valuer's perspective, relying instead on agents, friends, and gut instinct. Belinda Botzolis is changing that. In an industry where valuers are almost invisible to the people whose homes they assess, she is quietly doing something radical: explaining it clearly, accessibly, and without an agenda.
About Belinda
Belinda Botzolis is the founding director of Add Value, a property valuation consultancy. With 17 years of experience, a degree in Property Economics, and dual registration as a certified valuer and tax agent, she has valued nearly $12 billion in Australian real estate across residential, government acquisition, and investment work. She built her reputation online by translating complex property and tax concepts into plain, accessible language — driven by a belief that everyone deserves to understand the rules of the game they are already playing.
Watch / Listen
▶️  Watch the full episode on YouTube
🎧  Available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts

If this episode resonated, please like, subscribe and share — it helps Build Beautiful continue to tell deeper stories from the world of design, architecture and creative life.

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!
Her water broke on the last day of filming The Great Gatsby. She had spent years inside Baz Luhrmann's creative world — researching Moulin Rouge in Paris, drinking absinthe in the streets, helping Catherine Martin dress Beyoncé, designing over 200 rugs for the Faena Hotel in New York. And she did all of it as the black sheep of a Lebanese-Australian family where everyone else became a doctor, a surgeon, or an engineer. She was the one who took the detour. As it turned out, the detour was the whole thing.
Silvana Azzi Heras is the founder of House of Heras, a Sydney-based textile and interior design studio known for its maximalist, emotionally rich patterns rooted in folklore, flora, and cultural memory. Before founding her studio, she spent over a decade as head designer at Bazmark — Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin's creative company — working across Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, La Bohème on Broadway, and The Get Down for Netflix.
This is a conversation about what it means to follow an instinct when the world expects something safer from you. About heritage and culture as the raw material of a creative life. About the phone call that changes everything — and what happens when you finally say yes to yourself. About maximalism as a philosophy, not just an aesthetic. And about the strange, glittering, unglamorous work of building something entirely your own.
In this episode, we explore:
Growing up Lebanese-Australian: arriving in Sydney at age two, navigating identity, and returning to Beirut at 35 to understand her parents' resilience
Being the 'black sheep' youngest of five — how family pressure shaped the long road to design
Starting with a Bachelor of Welfare Studies, meeting her husband there, and going back to university as a mature-age student to study design
The phone call that changed everything: how a university lecturer put her name forward for Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin's studio
Life inside Bazmark — researching Moulin Rouge! in Paris, drinking absinthe, walking the streets, and building a world from scratch
The Gatsby baby — her water breaking on the last day of filming The Great Gatsby
Going to Cannes twice and the Oscars twice, including helping Catherine Martin dress Beyonce
Designing over 200 rugs for the Faena Hotel New York, in collaboration with Peter Mikic
Founding House of Heras — filling a gap for maximalist, culturally rich design in a minimalist market
Pre-visualisation as a design practice, the art of knowing when to stop, and why there are no shortcuts
Why this conversation matters
In a design world that often rewards restraint and minimalism, Silvana Azzi Heras is doing something rarer: making work that holds memory, carries culture, and takes emotional risks. Her story is also a reminder that the creative path is rarely linear — that detours, late starts, and unexpected phone calls are often the beginning of something extraordinary.
About the guest
Silvana Azzi Heras is the founder and creative director of House of Heras, a Sydney-based design studio specialising in textiles, rugs, wallpaper, and interior design. She spent over a decade as head designer at Bazmark, the production company of Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, working across some of the most visually ambitious films and productions of the past two decades. Her textile collections are stocked internationally and she has designed for the Faena Hotel New York, Designer Rugs, Milton & King, and CB2 in the United States. House of Heras is expanding into commercial interior design, and a new Axminster rug collection is due for release later in 2026.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
House of Heras website: houseofheras.com
Instagram: @houseofheras and @silvanaazziheras
Designer Rugs: designerrugs.com.au
Milton & King wallpaper: miltonandking.comCB2 
(US): cb2.com
Faena Hotel New York: faena.com/new-york
Peter Mikic: mikicdesign.com

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.