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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

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