Build Beautiful

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...

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 Botzoli...

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-Australia...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Helen Lynch and Karyn McRae, co-founders of McRae & Lynch Design, have been in business together for thirty years. They met on the first day of design school, started taking on projects while they were still studying, and have since built one of Sydney's most quietly enduring interior design practices, spanning residential, medical, hospitality...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! For years, she was running her architecture practice on passion alone. The work was good. The clients were happy. And the money wasn't working. She described it as being "happy but broke" — a phrase so clean and so honest that it stopped being hers the moment she said it, because everyone who builds something creative knows exactly what s...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! There's a version of living with art that most people never reach. They buy something. They hang it. They look at it sometimes. And then there's the other version — where the piece you chose changes the way you see the room, then the way you see yourself, and then, if you're lucky, the way you move through the world. Kym Elphinstone has s...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Most designers listen to the brief. Alexandra Donohoe Church listens to what's beneath it. She reads desire, not just preference. Habit, not just taste. The gap between what a client says they want and what they actually need — and she has spent 16 years navigating that gap with a restraint and precision that most designers spend a career trying to...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! When Darren Genner started his career, he was on a production line in western Sydney — making 34 kitchens a day. Not designing them. Making them. Fast. Somewhere in that sawdust and volume, he developed something most design school graduates never acquire: an absolute, granular understanding of how things are actually built. That foundation — unglamorou...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Nasim Koerting grew up knowing what it means not to belong. Her parents arrived in Australia as refugees from Iran, and she inherited both their drive — the relentless, exhausting migrant roadmap: study, prove yourself, never stop — and their deepest, quietest wish: to belong somewhere, fully, without apology. She has spent her career trying to answer t...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! When Sophie Vander launched her online art gallery from a Singapore apartment at 3am, she broke the most sacred rule in the art world: she put the prices online. Galleries didn't do that. It wasn't how things were done. She did it anyway — because she believed that transparency was the only way to make art accessible to real people, not just c...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! She was running her architecture practice when it happened. Her husband went into sudden cardiac arrest, right in front of her. She saved his life. And then the adrenaline wore off, and what followed was something nobody prepares you for — not the near-loss itself, but the long, disorienting aftermath of surviving it. Trauma, burnout, nervous system col...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Somewhere in the mid-1980s, a young designer was working at Parish-Hadley in New York — one of the most storied interior design firms in the world, under Albert Hadley, one of the most influential designers who ever lived. He absorbed everything: the history, the discipline, the relationship between craft and restraint. Then he moved to Australia, where...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! For years, Kate Nixon sat on the other side of the beautiful rooms: the one with the notepad, the editorial eye, the ability to see what made a space sing and translate it into words for a magazine audience. She was good at it. She understood design at a level most designers would envy. And then she left, to build a studio of her own, and discovered the...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! She was a corporate accountant. She had a new baby. And a psychic looked at her and said: your corporate career is over. You need to go study interior design. What happened next is the kind of story that only makes complete sense in retrospect — because the next step led somewhere she never could have planned, and the step after that even further. Somew...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! He grew up in Queanbeyan — a small town near Canberra that doesn't have a great reputation, as he'll tell you himself, with a warmth that makes clear he's grateful it formed him. First-generation Australian, son of immigrants from former Yugoslavia, he was sketching elaborate houses with columns and extensions at age four. No one told him...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Jenn Sinclair grew up between Hong Kong and the Central Coast of NSW, learning early what it means to have to work to belong. She came third in her class, then ranked last in the top class, and made that her engine. That drive — the quiet, determined refusal to accept the limited version of what you could become — is exactly what she brought into proper...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! She started studying psychology because she needed therapy. Her mother had died when she was 15. Her father had been traumatised by the Holocaust. And in a world that didn't yet have words for any of that, she found her way through by trying to understand — people, systems, what holds things together and what breaks them apart. That instinct never...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! In a design industry that increasingly rewards the photogenic — the perfectly lit, perfectly staged, algorithm-optimised interior — Tammy Miconi has chosen a different measure. She believes a home should tell the story of the people who live in it, not the taste of the moment. That belief isn't just a philosophy. It's a business risk. Because...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Alix Helps breaks down interior design business foundations: profit , pricing , process , and pipeline—how to keep a design studio profitable through feast and famine. We cover P&L, Xero reconciliation, procurement markup, boundaries , and more.  Alix has spent 12 years proving that beautiful interiors and smart business sense aren't mutually e...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Twenty years ago, if you were a woman who wanted to practise architecture and have a family, the industry had a clear message: choose. The structures, the hours, the culture — none of it bent for you. Eva-Marie Prineas heard that message, and instead of adapting herself to a world that didn't want to make room, she built her own practice from the g...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! There was a moment, three or four years into building The Local Project, when Aidan Anderson sat down after running payroll and looked at his bank account. He had $1,500 left. Not: oh God, is this going to work? But: this is going to work. What's the plan? That distinction — between crisis and clarity — is what separates this story from almost ever...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! When Sally Dan-Cuthbert walked into a gallery opening she'd never been invited to, called a director she'd never met, and asked if she could help — she had no formal art training, no plan, and no safety net. She just had a deep sense that this was where she was supposed to be. She was starting over in her 50s, when most people she knew were th...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! At some point in her career, Meryl Hare made a decision that most designers would find terrifying. She walked away from the volume, the busyness, the spread, the validation of being in demand and chose depth instead. She went from 37 clients to 7. Not because things were falling apart. Because she knew they would if she didn't. Meryl Hare OAM is th...

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments! Build Beautiful is Where Design Meets Depth . This podcast is about the journeys of creative entrepreneurs - architects, designers, developers, artists, and cultural voices, who are building lives and businesses shaped with intention. Hosted by creative entrepreneur Linda Habak , each conversation looks beyond the surface of beautiful work to uncover th...