THE EDIT

What does a truly beautiful home look like when you stop chasing trends—and start telling the truth? In this episode of The Edit, host (and former colleague) Elle Lovelock sits down with interiors heavyweight Neale Whitaker: the gently opinionated eye behind some of Australia’s most-loved design titles and TV shows, from Belle and Home Beautiful to Love It or List It—and now Reno Rules on Seven.
Together they take an audio home tour of Neale’s “patchwork quilt” South Coast cottage, from the wraparound verandah draped in wisteria to rooms packed with art collected everywhere he and partner David have lived and travelled. Neale shares why he buys art on pure instinct (and why it should never ‘match the sofa’), how he and David blend antique and contemporary tastes, and what ‘dog-friendly’ design actually looks like when the dogs are absolutely allowed on the bed. Plus: the entertaining rituals he can’t give up (candles, music, the perfect table), why being a TV judge doesn’t mean judging your house, and the tiny home edit he wishes he’d made years earlier—one that punches well above its weight every winter.
Moments You'll Hear:
An audio walk-through of Neale’s quirky ‘patchwork quilt’ cottage (yes—there are two front doors).
How Neale buys and hangs art: instinct-first, story-driven, and never matched to the furnishings.
Why a home that’s “perfect” is usually boring—and how to build comfort, layers, and soul.
Designing with dogs: choosing what you love, then problem-solving (towels, throws, and muddy paws).
Hosting without the stress: beautiful table, candles, music… but always relaxed.
The tiny edit with a big payoff: underfloor heating (and the power of lamps in dark corners).
Authenticity over trends: mixing old and new to make a home that feels like you.
This is an episode with permission to ignore trends and buy what you actually love. Confidence that your art doesn't need to match anything. A renewed appreciation for warm lighting and the ritual of turning on lamps. Practical solutions for real design dilemmas. The reminder that homes should feel like you - layered, honest, maybe a little eccentric. And possibly a new perspective on your throw situation.
Thank you for listening ❤️
before you leave...
🗣️ Get in touch
What did you think? We are a brand new podcast and would love to hear from you as we build this together. Join our friendly Home Beautiful community and DM us on Instagram.
Part one episode with Neale: here 🎧
👀 See more
Neale Whitaker Joins My Reno Rules as a Judge in 2026
My Reno Rules Just Gave Us Our First Look
Inside Neale Whitaker’s Country Cottage
The New Season of Love It or List It Australia Has a Release Date
My Reno Rules All The Details For The New Series!

🙏 Our special thanks for making 'The Edit' our new home:
Luxaflex - our beautiful 'studio home' curtains
Oz Design - furniture Australians love
Credits:
Our friend Neale Whitaker
Edited by Propod
Production by Thomas Crnkovic and Charlie Potter
Our wonderful Home Beautiful team
Learn More: HOME BEAUTIFUL

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve ever stood in your living room and felt nothing, this one’s for you. Stylist, author and TV reno judge Julia Green joins Editor Elle Lovelock to talk about building a home that feels like an autobiography, not a catalogue spread. She went from “peddling drugs” (pharmaceuticals) for 17 years in a job she hated to styling shoots, closing her beloved store and now judging My Reno Rules, all while raising a family and painting every available surface in colour.
Julia is funny and unfiltered about the gap between how interiors look on TV and how they actually feel to live in. She talks about growing up with a mum who let her paint her bedroom walls on a whim, decking out her first flat with no money but a lot of ingenuity, and why she’ll always choose “considered chaos” over safe beige. There’s career whiplash, there’s grief for past chapters, and there’s the quiet joy of realising your house doesn’t have to be perfect to feel like home, it just has to feel like you.
Moments you’ll hear
Julia deadpanning that she used to “peddle drugs” (legally) in pharma for nearly two decades, hating every minute, before a stranger buying her couch told her she was in the wrong job and handed her a Vogue photographer’s business card.

The chaos‑magic timing of going into labour four hours after that conversation and only circling back to the card at the end of maternity leave, a week before she was meant to return to corporate life.

The “I’ve got a new job, I’m a stylist tomorrow” conversation with her husband, despite having no idea what the day rate was and only a Home Beautiful style brief to go on.

Childhood bedrooms that changed colour constantly, a mum who let her paint the walls as often as she liked, and the lesson that home is something you’re allowed to experiment with, not preserve in glass.

Julia explaining why she can’t do white‑on‑white (“I’d last two seconds”) and how she thinks about colour as “deliberate chaos” - surprise without visual shock.

How she furnished her first apartment with basically no budget, just a sharp eye and a willingness to hunt, and why she’s now the stylist who tells people, “Do you really need that?” instead of pushing more stuff.

Behind the scenes of My Reno Rules: judging alongside Neale Whitaker and Simon Cohen, trying to keep two strangers’ styles coherent in one house, and what really happens when communication breaks down on a reno show.

The emotional side of closing her much‑loved store, stepping into a new TV chapter, and figuring out what kind of home she wants to come back to at the end of it all.

Thank you for listening ❤️
before you leave...
🗣️ Get in touch
What did you think? We are a brand new podcast and would love to hear from you as we build this together. Join our friendly Home Beautiful community and DM us on Instagram.
👀 See more
My Reno Rules All The Details For The New Series!
Clever With Colour and Julia Green
Julia Green on Insta 📱
Julia's Website Green House Interiors
🙏 Our special thanks for making 'The Edit' our new home:
Luxaflex - our beautiful 'studio home' curtains
Oz Design - furniture Australians love
Credits:
Our friend Julia Green
Edited by Propod
Production by Thomas Crnkovic and Charlie Potter
Our wonderful Home Beautiful team
Learn More: HOME BEAUTIFUL

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve ever stood in a beige box of a rental property, staring at the vertical blinds and mystery downlights, wondering how on earth this is supposed to be “you,” this episode is your permission to start again. In part two of our chat with digital creator and “friend in home and hosting” Loui Burke, we move past Instagram-ready corners and get into the mechanics of making a temporary space feel like a real home you’re proud to invite people into.
Loui shares the three non‑negotiables he believes will transform any rental - no renovations, no landlord approval forms required: a properly sized rug, real window treatments, and light fixtures you can swap out and take with you when you leave. He explains why these are the quiet workhorses of a room, doing more for mood and cohesion than yet another cushion haul ever could, and how to approach them when you’re on a budget, short on storage, or not sure how long you’ll be staying.
For anyone overwhelmed by a modern “white box” home or apartment, Loui offers an unexpectedly brilliant styling hack alongside editor Elle Lovelock: treat your favourite flagship stores and boutique hotels as living moodboards. From Mecca and fashion flagships in Armadale or Paddington to carefully designed Airbnbs, Loui breaks down how to steal their ideas, colour palettes, materials, layout tricks, and translate them directly into your living room, bedroom or hallway. Genius! There’s also a very practical chat about foundational furniture in small spaces, why a modular sofa might save your sanity (and your stairwell), and how a tape measure is still the most underrated design tool you own.
Moments you’ll hear:
The simple, movable pieces that make any rental feel instantly more like home: rugs, lamps, light shades, and curtains you can take with you

How to “shop” Airbnbs, hotels and retail flagships for layout and material ideas when your place is just a featureless white box

Why thinking like a store designer, considering thresholds, shelving, and sightlines, can change the way you arrange even the smallest apartment

Smart, non‑boring advice on big furniture buys in rentals, from choosing modular sofas to measuring doorways so your dream couch doesn’t get stranded on the street

If you’re renting, in between homes, or just convinced your place is too bland to bother with, this episode is your blueprint for turning “for now” into something that finally feels like yours.
Thank you for listening ❤️
before you leave...
🗣️ Get in touch
What did you think? We are a brand new podcast and would love to hear from you as we build this together. Join our friendly Home Beautiful community and DM us on Instagram.
👀 See more
Part 1 Loui Burke - Cheap and Cheerful Decorating
Great (easy) Ideas for Rented Apartments
🙏 Our special thanks for making 'The Edit' our new home:
Luxaflex - our beautiful 'studio home' curtains
Oz Design - furniture Australians love
Credits:
Our friend Loui Burke
Edited by Propod
Production by Thomas Crnkovic
Our wonderful Home Beautiful team
Learn More: HOME BEAUTIFUL

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve ever looked at a glossy renovation and thought, “Must be nice to start with money,” this episode is the part no one usually tells you.
Lysandra Fraser first appeared in our lives in a police uniform, standing back-to-back with her twin sister, Alisa, on The Block audition tape, manifesting a win before they’d laid a single tile. They did, indeed, win twice - and became known for calm, quietly luxe interiors that looked like they belonged to people who had always lived that way. But in this conversation, Lysandra walks Editor Elle Lovelock through the bits that never made it into the reveal shots: growing up in Housing Commission with a single mum, secretly mortified to bring friends home, painting the hallway in suede‑finish purple to try and make it feel less “less than".
Lysandra talks about leaving the police force after reality TV, building a design business by sheer instinct (and zero formal training), and then selling her own dream house to fund al.ive BODY, the beauty and home brand she co‑founded with Alisa. For six years, while designing multi-million dollar homes for clients and being asked what it was like to be “a millionaire from The Block,” Lysandra was living in a friend’s dilapidated granny flat, followed by a three‑bedroom ’70s rental with apricot walls and floral carpet. This is not a sob story! More of a reality check on what risk actually looks like when you’re a single mum with two teenage boys and a public profile people project onto.
Moments You'll Hear
How two exhausted Adelaide cops with babies at home decided, one auction night, that they weren’t just applying for The Block, they were going to win it, and why they actually believed that.
The whiplash of going from Housing Commission to TV renovations to clients with Louis Vuitton “thank you” gifts, and the imposter syndrome that sits under it all.
The very un‑Pinterest path to interior design: no moodboards, no Pinterest, no Insta, just learning on the job, taking judge feedback on the chin, and then reverse-engineering a career out of it.
Why Lysandra now believes in “who, not how”: building a team of CAD wizards and specialists so she can stay in the lane she’s actually good at, instead of trying to be across everything.
A sensory tour of her current home: black, refined, functional and the mental gymnastics of describing it when you know people assume you’ve “always” lived like this.
What it really costs to launch a product brand from scratch, and why Lysandra thinks more founders should say out loud, “Yes, I sold my house for this.”
If you’re sitting in a neutral rental, doom scrolling renos and wondering how everyone else got so far ahead, consider this your reminder that the before shots of someone’s life are rarely on the grid.
Thank you for listening ❤️
before you leave...
🗣️ Get in touch
What did you think? We are a brand new podcast and would love to hear from you as we build this together. Join our friendly Home Beautiful community and DM us on Instagram.
👀 See more
Lysandra Fraser website
The Famous Farmhouse Home that Lysandra and Alison made
Lysandra Fraser on Insta
Great (easy) Ideas for Rented Apartments
🙏 Our special thanks for making 'The Edit' our new home:
Luxaflex - our beautiful 'studio home' curtains
Oz Design - furniture Australians love
Credits:
Edited by Propod
Production by Thomas Crnkovic
Our wonderful Home Beautiful team
Learn More: HOME BEAUTIFUL

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve ever stood in the middle of your place, scrolling inspo pics and thinking, “I have no idea where to start,” this episode is your shortcut to a home that actually feels like you live there - not like you borrowed it from a display village.
Design and real estate expert James Treble (yes...you’ve seen him give excellent advice on The Living Room and his own reno series) sits down with Editor Elle Lovelock to decode how to turn any house, yes, even the ugly red‑brick, asbestos‑ridden one, into a calm, character‑filled home with a story. He starts with the artwork he literally pulled off his own wall, explains why your partner’s signed footy jersey still counts as “art”, and shows you how to build an entire colour scheme from one picture, op‑shop find or kids’ drawing.
From there, James walks you through his Central Coast renovation: the bright yellow double doors, the breeze‑block wall, the terrazzo‑look tiles and the decision to completely flip the kitchen, bathroom and entry layout because “you do not have to stick to the original floor plan.” He breaks down which eras of Australian houses are secretly goldmines, how to know if a place has good bones within 30 seconds at an open home, and why you should almost always start with a hallway or bedroom before you even think about the kitchen.
Moments you'll hear:
Why “homemaking” is making a comeback and how to tell your own story at home without spending a fortune.
James’s simple method for using art as your colour roadmap (including what to do if your partner’s taste is…challenging).
A tour of his once‑hideous red‑brick house and the exact moves that turned it into a light, layered, mid‑century‑inspired haven.
The eras and house types he’d buy in a heartbeat, and the structural red flags that should have you walking straight back out the door.
How to create an overarching “story” (coastal, modern farmhouse, mountain escape) so every room decision stops feeling random.
Why having two bathrooms is the new non‑negotiable and clever ways to carve one out of a laundry or awkward corner.
If you’re renting, renovating or just itching to repaint one room and see what happens, this episode will give you the confidence, language and starting points to finally make your home look like the life you’re actually living inside it.
Thank you for listening ❤️
before you leave...
🗣️ Get in touch
What did you think? We are a brand new podcast and would love to hear from you as we build this together. Join our friendly Home Beautiful community and DM us on Instagram.
👀 See more
James Treble Website
More than a 'Granny Flat', leveraging the opportunity with extra space and James Treble
How to identify the architectural style of your house
Great (easy) Ideas for Rented Apartments
🙏 Our special thanks for making 'The Edit' our new home:
Luxaflex - our beautiful 'studio home' curtains
Oz Design - furniture Australians love
Credits:
Edited by Propod
Production by Thomas Crnkovic
Our wonderful Home Beautiful team
Learn More: HOME BEAUTIFUL

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.