Ep. 157: Designing for Dramatic Effect with Yasmine Ghoniem

Interior designer and self-described “cocktail,” Yasmine Ghoniem has lived a whirlwind life across continents, cultures, and careers. Born in Kuwait to Australian and Egyptian parents, she lived throughout the Middle East before moving to the United States to attend Savannah College of Art and Design. She always had a deep love for music, feeling destined to be a performer, she formed indie rock bands with family and friends throughout the years. Yasmine eventually put down roots in Sydney, Australia where she founded and leads YSG Studio, an interior design studio focusing on residential and hospitality. She brings her eclectic influences and flair for the theatrical drama of staging and storytelling to all of her spaces. Intoxicating indeed! 

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Read the Transcript

Yasmine Ghoniem: I’m picking up stuff continually, from different times and melding them into something that I thought was the now.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Yasmine Ghoniem. Yasmine is founder and Principal of YSG Studio, an Interior design studio that focuses mainly on residential and hospitality. Born in Kuwait, she’s lived in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Australia, United States to attend Savannah College of Art and Design or SCAD, (and also spent a stint living in her car) before settling back in Sydney. Having always been a musician and performed in bands, Initially, she wanted to be an entertainer... but after falling in love with interior design, she now harnesses that innate sense of staging and storytelling to dramatic effect in her design work. In 2013 she co-founded Amber Road, a multi-disciplinary design studio, with her sister, and this past year has gone on to open her own YSG Studio. Which, within its inaugural year, has made quite an entrance and earned a lot of attention and accolades in Australia and beyond. With her blended heritage she describes herself as a “cocktail”... and she is indeed intoxicating… Here’s Yasmine

YG: My name is Yasmine Ghoniem, I live and work in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia and I am an interior designer by trade. I do it because I actually feed off of my environment a lot and I think there’s a way to teach people how to live the best self possible and I like to think that I can help people achieve that. 

Amy: I feed off my environment too, so I relate. Let’s go all the way back to zero though. I understand you had quite a nomadic and dramatic upbringing, so can you tell me the story of your childhood? 

Yasmine: Yeah, I’ve got my parents to thank for that. My mother is Australian and my dad is Egyptian and they met in Libya, of all places. And I was born in Kuwait, so I do feel since the get-go I’ve always been thrown into situations that seem quite out of place or disjunct or just quite unusual. I’m not Kuwaiti at all, but my parents happened to have been there when mom gave birth to me, I suppose. So we lived there for a short while and then we moved to Saudi Arabia for a bit and then returned back to Sydney when I was quite small for about three and a half years. 

That was really my first, I guess taste of being out of the Middle East, I guess. And then when I was about seven dad. He’s in the oil industry so obviously working in Australia was almost non-existent, essentially. These were the days where he’d sit by a phone and wait for a telephone call for work and one day got a call and it was a job offering in Kuwait. So he jumped at the opportunity, got on a plane and started working on an oil rig. But unfortunately the day that he arrived in Kuwait the Iraqis invaded and that was Desert Storm essentially. 

Amy: Oh my goodness. 

Yasmine: And he disappeared for seven months. We didn’t know where he was and then one day he just turned up, magically -

Amy: What?

Yasmine: And said we’re moving back to Kuwait. He’d been putting the fires out for seven months and he was smuggled through Syria and arrived back on our Sydney townhouse in the 80s, just going, yeah, we’re packing up and we’re leaving and moving to Kuwait -

Amy: Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait. So for seven months you had no idea where your dad was? 

Yasmine: Yeah. 

Amy: And what does that do to your psyche? I mean does it test your sense of hope of whether you’ll ever see him again? 

Yasmine: I guess I was young, but I think I was more upset for my mum because she was just beside herself. I remember visions of her on the telephone calling into radio stations with family members in similar situations who had lost family overseas and was just crying out and seeing if there was a response. And so I did feel super sad for her. I have a half-brother and a half-sister. My mum was married before and they lived with us, my brother and sister at the same time, while we were living in Australia.

So the household was always a bit of a (laughs), definitely there was always some drama. For me it was normal, it sounds terrible and not particularly,supportive or anything but it just felt like another thing that our family was just dealing with. So dad appeared, he said we’re leaving, so we left Australia and I remember this feeling in the plane as I was flying across -

Amy: Wait, I’m sorry, I need a little more. So dad appeared and he said, we’re leaving, was there some jubilation? 

Yasmine: No, it was very fast… Yes, absolutely, absolutely (laughter) -

Amy: Some questions about where have you been, why haven’t you called? 

Yasmine: Yeah, obviously naturally he arrived and we were absolutely dumbfounded and beside ourselves with joy and happiness, but it was a very swift packing up situation - I’d say we would have packed up our entire house in say a week and we were gone. 

Amy: And you were like seven years old at his point? 

Yasmine: Yeah. 

Amy: So also ripped away from any friends you had made and -

Yasmine: Yeah and that was tough. I’ve moved around a lot and I’ve gone to different schools and had loads of different friend groups. This one in particular I felt. Had taken me a long time to get this friend group. I had always felt a little bit of, just an outsider because I wasn’t fully Aussie and I wasn’t fully Arabic and I never felt like I truly 100% fit in, especially in a very white Australia in the 80s. I went to an all-girls school and felt very isolated essentially. 

I finally had found that space where I felt comfortable and being told that we were leaving was yeah, it was very upsetting. But when I moved, again, it took a long time, but at the same there were so many people like myself who were cocktails, who had Arabic fathers and they married outside in the Middle East and it was such a great environment, melting pot of incredibly interesting mixes, like half Russian, half Egyptian, half Somalian, half Australian, half Brazilian, half Kuwaiti, just really beautiful - Incredible mixes. Yeah, I feel like we always laughed and called Kuwait a train platform. It was this transitory space where people would come and go and you knew if somebody left, someone amazing would replace or step into their space and I got a lot out of my relationships and I’m still in such close contact with everybody there that I went to high school with. Funnily enough, I’m actually designing one of my girlfriend’s house back in Kuwait -

Amy: I love that. 

Yasmine: I haven’t been there since I left, so we’re connecting in crazy ways, even as I step into my 40s. So it’s very cool. 

Amy: So you spent the rest of your youth and your teenage years in Kuwait then? 

Yasmine: Yeah, I did. I graduated high school and then I actually worked at my mum’s school, she was an English teacher and I worked as an art teacher for a year as a gap year before I went to uni. And I had my heart set on going to the States. So I did my first year of college in Dubai actually, in visual communications and then I got a scholarship to Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. And it was funny because we had recruitment; people from all sorts of different universities visit high schools in Kuwait. 

And one of them was from SCAD and I remember flicking through the book, just going, oh my god, it would be just such a dream to go to this school. And I remember feeling I would just love to be in that book one day, at some point, if I ever went to that college, I wanted to be in that book and I wanted to influence someone’s decision in going to the uni because it looked so great.

Amy: You said your heart set on going to the United States, but had you already started developing your creativity and how you were expressing yourself in Kuwait in the teenager years that would have informed this decision?  

Yasmine: Kuwait, I was surrounded by some really incredible people and everybody was really different and very theatrical and I don’t have a single friend that went into science or anything like that. They were all very creative people and I do feel that living in an environment like Kuwait where you don’t have everything at your fingertips and it is a bit of a struggle to find the goodness in things and just, you don’t have access to the same things in Kuwait as you would if you great up in the States or Australia or the UK. 

So watching MTV for me was like an absolute highlight of my week. I would creep into my living room at midnight because I could get MTV when no one was watching. And I would really resonate with the videos. I love music, I’ve played music since, I don’t know, since I was like six and it’s always been a really huge part of my life, as has dance. And so that was my true calling, I thought. I wanted to be an entertainer, I wanted to be a performer, I wanted to be on the stage. 

Amy: What kind of band were you in? What did you play or how did you perform? 

Yasmine: Well, I was in Kuwait, I was actually in a band called The Ex Pat Story (laughs) filled with ex-pats and actually the girl that I mentioned, Selma, whose house I’m designing, she was in the band with me. She has an amazing voice and we would play out in shopping malls or just the weirdest of places. And to be doing that as a female in the 90s was really, not a common thing. And I didn’t see anything wrong with it, but I was, I guess, at heart a little bit more rebellious than some. It was a very -

Amy: Is this the kind of thing that was supported by your family or were they like, go ahead but just be careful or?

Yasmine: Yeah, my parents were always really supportive of my passions, but at the same time my dad is a realist and like so many dads, wants you to be successful and happy, but he’s also really mindful that entertainment is a hard gig; you might not achieve what you want. It’s really taxing, it’s really competitive, you don’t make that much money, all these kinds of things that as a dad -

Amy: Dream killer! I’m kidding. 

Yasmine: (Laughter) He was a little bit of a… Get a stable job and even stepping into interiors wasn’t something that he was that keen on either. But that was my second choice, so that’s kind of how I fell into design really -

Amy: Oh, the old compromise. 

Yasmine: Yeah, it was the old compromise. 

Amy: I know that one! (Laughs) It’s creative, but it’s also kind of business’y dad, we’re gonna be all right. 

Yasmine: I think I was always destined to do a bit of both. I definitely have always felt very affected, I think with my intro I was like, I feed off of my environment and I do, it either gives me so much of it takes away from me. And I just get so affected by a space. It makes me feel either really incredible or just soul destroyingly sad and not uplifting and depressed, you know? I’ve always felt a draw to creating spaces that truly can enhance your everyday and just make you feel unstoppable, like that you can do anything. And that’s what I’m trying to do. 

Amy: I like it.

Yasmine: I was in visual communications previously, before doing interiors and that’s exactly… I had that same very moment where I was walking past one of the uni halls and I just saw a barrage of 100 people in this one room looking at computer screens and I knew that that would be my life, that would be my future if I had pursued a career in graphics, in graphic design. And I had a passion for that too. And I said, no, uh-uh, and I went straight to accounts learn, I said, I don’t think this is for me, like what can I do and this is where we sat down and I ticked every single box that had to do with spaces, architecture, design. So that went from furniture design to textile design, to lighting, to spatial, to architecture, to everything. And that’s when I knew interiors would fully encompass everything I loved. 

Amy: Doesn’t that feel good? 

Yasmine: Yeah. I feel like there is definitely a moment in my life where these worlds, these two worlds will collide in the perfect marrying of what I’m actually really supposed to do, my true calling, I feel, is still on the horizon. I’m not sure when it’s appearing, but I feel like it’s really close. 

Amy: Ooh, stay tuned!

Yasmine: Don’t you feel like that? Don’t you feel like there is something that everyone is supposed to do and spending their entire lives unravelling what it is? 

Amy: Yeah, absolutely, I feel like some things are around the corner for me too. I mean not like it’s just gonna magically arrive, but that I’m actually sort of weaving a new chapter of my life - And I’m not exactly sure how it’s gonna turn out, but I’m pretty excited about what I’m doing with it. These are all just stepping stones and it’s so exciting being able to actually see into the future a little bit and know that you’ve still got a few stones that you’ve got to jump to. 

Amy: Not only that, but I’ve got all these tools that I picked up along the way, so like - You can build a pretty sweet space on any stone you jump too. 

Yasmine: (Laughs) Yeah, it’s exciting. 

Amy: Okay, so we’re back to SCAD, you ticked off all the boxes, you’re studying interior design, are you in Savannah at this point -

Yasmine: I did my first year at the American University in Dubai and then I transferred and absolutely loved that experience, the college was incredible. I think it actually just got listed as one of the best interior courses in America, actually worldwide I think. It was a really fantastic, supportive space. And Savannah itself is just an absolute beautiful little city; it’s a very complicated little city -

Amy: Yes, very complicated.

Yasmine: It does have some very dark history attached to that place. But it’s so beautiful. I loved Savannah and then I jumped in a car and drove across your incredibly large country and -

Amy: It’s pretty big. 

Yasmine: Landed in Portland, Oregon where I remained for a further three years and jumped around some architectural practices. 

Amy: Oh?

Yasmine: So Portland was great and again, Pacific Northwest is just an absolute joy to be surrounded within daily, it’s so beautiful. But yeah, that was fun. Lived in my car for six month because I didn’t have a job. It took a long time to get work over in Portland when I graduated. 

Amy: Was it at least a cargo van?

Yasmine: it was a very dingy red Isuzu truck. I had moved across with a uni friend of mine, Monique, who was a fashion designer. And she was struggling. It was a tough time when I first left - this was 2004, I think I had done some drawings for a park, a theme park, some entry gates and I got paid 600 bucks, which was a lot of money. They paid me $600 cash to draw these gates and that was what paid my way across the country to Portland. And then I lived in my car for a little while (laughs) and then I worked in a carpet shop, a carpet showroom. I couldn’t believe I got a job; I was just amazed that somebody was giving me a job. So I before that painted an Agnes Martin painting in this guy’s architecture office for free because he thought I really needed to know, or learn about color. (Laughs) So I did that for free for a bit. 

Amy: Life is so random. (Laughs)

Yasmine: You know, I said earlier I do find myself in these very precarious, strange situations and this was definitely one of them. 

Amy: So living in your car, is that the kind of thing that would have scared your parents or is that the kind of thing where you had already proved yourself so self-sufficient they would be like, oh Yasmine, that’s just so her? 

Yasmine: (Laughs) I don’t know, I don’t even know if my parents really know that part about me. 

Amy: Oh no, sorry mom. 

Yasmine: (Laughter) No, my parents definitely, my parents were very well aware of my absolute stubbornness but willingness to just be me and they get that and they appreciate it. I think they thought it might go away, but it only got stronger. 

Amy: Isn’t that funny how that is because if you try and push it down, it really doesn’t go away. 

Yasmine: No, it actually makes it come out even more. So I feel like my 40s because I’ve literally just turned 40 a couple of weeks ago -

Amy: Happy birthday. 

Yasmine: Thank you! It was not where I wanted to be spending my 40th in lockdown, but some people are spending their second birthday in lockdown, second year in a row, which is just madness, so I should be lucky that I got to spend, my 39th somewhere else, other than my living room (laughs). 

Amy: Yes, I’m also hoping that being the designer you are, your living room is a pretty special place to spend your 40th. 

Yasmine: Oh, it’s great, it was super fun. I actually had a really great day but I feel like as I’m stepping into this new decade, which I was really fearful of, there’s nothing actually scary about it, I felt really empowered on that day, that there’s so much goodness to come. 

Amy: I like it! Optimism. 

Yasmine: Yeah, it’s gonna be good. 

Amy: Let’s get to that goodness but I need to figure out how you got out of your car. Are you still doing music at this point or?

Yasmine: I’ve been doing music all through uni and then my boyfriend at the time, he came over, he’s a mad musician and climber and painter, incredible person. And we were still making music in his garage and basement and throwing stuff around, but we weren’t doing any performing or anything like that. What happened after the car gig, I did the carpet showroom and then I got offered my true first interior design position at an architectural practice. 

So it was a 150 person firm. Myhre Group Architects in Portland Oregon, in downtown. And it was great, I made so many friends. It was my real taste of what, you know, what life as an interior designer looks like. And I remember I got the call that I got the job because I’d been looking for so long, I really didn’t think it was going to happen, ever happen. And I remember jumping up and down and squealing so hard (laughs). 

And my roommate and I could finally get an apartment. I remember going to IKEA and buying a bunch of stuff and then setting it all up and then stepping back in the living room going, oh shit, it looks like an IKEA showroom, what have I done? (Laughter)

Amy: [Over talking]… Experience that at some time, at some point (laughter). 

Yasmine: So yeah, that was a really, oh my god, I’ve made it kind of moment. I kind of switched around and went to another practice and then just before I left I got head hunted and started working at a really fantastic practice. It was boutique, it was small, it did celebrity residences and boutique hotels and things like that. It was really amazing, but at that point I think I’d already made the decision that I wanted to leave and move on and do something different. 

I wanted to see some of the world and I had always been really interested in aid work. So I saved up for about a year and then applied for a NGO placement in Kenya and Vietnam and did that for about a year. And worked at orphanages and built schools and it was really the most incredible experience. I dare to say that I got more out of it probably than the kids did and that pains me because I’d love to be doing so much more. But I just got so much out of it and felt so happy. 

Amy: How did it shape you?

Yasmine: Another big part of wanting to do interiors was being able to really create a home for someone who wasn’t fortunate enough to have one of their own that urge has come back really quite strongly to build… This might sound so incredibly lame, but I’d love to build an orphanage and I’d love to build this magical place for people to feel like their future is bright and that they can do whatever they put their mind to. They just need an environment that is supportive. 

Amy: I want you to do that, I’ll help. 

Yasmine: I want to do that -

Amy: I’ll totally come and help (laughter). I think you absolutely can foster a kind of hope and optimism and comfort. If people feel comforted, supported, nurtured in their environment, that sets them up. 

Yasmine: Right, it has to. Like how can it not? feel like some of the interiors we create, especially we did installations, I love installations and there’s always this magical Peter Pan like, offering that I don’t even see until it’s fully finished. I don’t go into it, designing it going; well this is how I wanted it to feel. But it always ends up feeling like magical and that it is pure… It’s a place that I’ve never seen before. And I’ve dreamed it and realized it and lived it and if I can do that over and over again in multiple kind of scenarios, I’d just be over the moon. I feel like I would then be offering something within the interior space that hasn’t been offered before. It’s such a saturated industry, how can you be different? How can you offer something different? And I don’t know if it’s for a private residential client, I want it to be more than that. I want it to be a stepping stone for somebody’s big first step.

Amy: I’m looking for the connection to your childhood. Is there a space you remember from your youth that imprinted on your memory? 

Yasmine: I think the Middle East is a world of glitz, but it’s also a world that’s so opposite to that too. And there is opulence but there is complete desolation and I saw both of those things and I saw what they made me feel and it’s not like the glitz made me feel any better than the non-glitz. They made me feel the same almost, but in a different way. I still felt empty and sad and depressed and depleted. So I feel like I have more places of things that I don’t like, that have made me go into… create places that make me feel good. But I’ve seen more of the bad in order to make me feel like I know what I don’t want. And I think that’s just as important -

Amy: I agree. You painted such a vivid picture because I’m contrasting the drab dehydrated landscape of the desert with the sort of artificial application of sparkle and tliz -Almost just makes you feel just as lonely because It’s not actually of the earth. It feels like a sad attempt at making a desert bedazzled or you know -

Yasmine: Yeah, yeah, it’s a strange world. I mean definitely it is like that in the UAE, in Dubai especially. But you know, where I come from, in Egypt, Egypt has got such immense, incredible history, like world history. 

Amy: Well, and texture and depth and layers and colors and heritage and craft and I can almost feel it. 

Yasmine: Yeah, and they do weave into my interiors and you can definitely see that ethnicity for lack of a better word. It definitely kind of comes through, but there is, especially when I was growing up in Kuwait, because it was still such a new, I guess, country, there was so little there. There was a desert. My high school was a block in a field, essentially. There was no trees, there was a very empty environment and it was all the one color. It was a very, not super uplifting environment. And my people were… The people made everything and that’s why the relationships were so important. 

Amy: All the cocktails. 

Yasmine: All the cocktails (laughter). That’s what I really truly want to do is make people’s lives feel like they have a little bit more meaning. 

Amy: Obviously you can do that for your clients, is there some other kind of direction you’re pointing yourself in to expand how you can do that for people? 

Yasmine: Yeah, I want to continue doing some type of charity work or be able to invite my world into a different world that really has never had that type of touch on -

Amy: Do you see yourself as being a mentor or a teacher at all? 

Yasmine: I have done some of that in the past and I enjoy it, but It’s not my calling I don’t think. My mom is a wonderful teacher. You have to have incredible patience to be a teacher and I just don’t think my Middle Eastern temperament is made up for that (laughs). 

Amy: I only ask because I see you wanting to sort of gift people who don’t… Bring your world into their world in a way that supports them -

Yasmine: Yeah. 

Amy: And one of the ways to do that is to also teach them your tools - Of your trade so that they can also… It’s a scale issue -

Yasmine: Yeah. I think I would like to just have the spaces be my gift and not really my teachings and let them kind of make themselves be anything that they can, you know? I don’t want to mold them in that way, essentially. 

Amy: So this aid work sounds really incredible and pivotal for you, but at some point you started Amber Road with one of your siblings - Which was your first design firm. 

Yasmine: Yeah, so after the aid work I came back to Australia and I hadn’t returned. I hadn’t been in Australia since I left, when my dad came back and said we were moving to Kuwait. So for me it was like a really, coming home experience. And I didn’t know if I wanted to return to interiors, to be honest and I actually applied for some work with Amnesty International and other NGOs and no one would have a bar of me because I didn’t really have any experience. I didn’t go to college for that. I went to college for interiors (laughs).

I begrudgingly went and got a job at an interiors practice, a small boutique firm in town and I lasted there for about, 18 months and I got fired because at that time I was heavily back into music and we were creating a band, my brother and I, and we were just spending a lot of time doing that. And I was writing at work and my boss kind of saw me do that and he said, yeah, I think it’s time to kind of cut the ties. And I was like, sweet, amazing, I’m so excited, I’ve been wanting to do this for so long. 

So I was like, great, I’ll start my own practice so that I can gig and I can do the gigs on the side and still be making an income. And so that’s essentially why I set up my own business up. It wasn’t because I wanted to change the world. It wasn’t that I thought I had anything particularly interesting to give someone. I wanted to play music. So -

Amy: I need to know what kind of music you were playing, are we talking show tunes, indie rock? 

Yasmine: I guess indie rock it was a little bit of everything. It was an all-girls band, my brother was the only non-girl in the band, but it was the five of us and it was super fun. It was with my cousin, my brother, my best mates. And it was a violin, a pianist, bass, it was a lot of really good interesting stuff. 

Amy: That sounds awesome, were you playing dive bars or like -

Yasmine: Yeah, we were playing bars and we slowly were working our way up because we did it for about a decade. We did heaps of recordings, released EPs and it was really fun and I really wanted it to go somewhere. And I think we were almost at that point where I feel like it was either going to go in that direction or it was going to fizzle out. And my drummer had a baby, my aunt died suddenly from a brain tumor and it was my pianist is also an actress and she got a gig overseas. 

So it just seemed like the natural fizzing component to a band was kind of at play. And that really crushed me and I was like, okay, well then I guess this is where I’m at again. I was at that crossroads of the whole, I want to do the music, I want to do the performance, but the world was not having it. So I went back to interiors and it’s always been this thing that I fall back to and it’s always been there for me. It is the supportive part to my story. 

I started Amber Road, my sister was living in Spain at the time and we got this amazing brief to design a hospitality venue on a barge in Shanghai on the Bund, on the River Bund. And I called up Katy, she was in Madrid -

Amy: What, that sounds amazing. 

Yasmine: I know (laughs) and I called up Katy because she’s a landscape architect. And I said, “Do you want to come back home and design this venue with me?” Because we’d always talked about starting a practice together and actually made a vow on top of this fort in Savannah that we would one day do it if we ever lived in the same country because we never lived in the same continent, for like decades. So she was in the midst of a divorce over in Spain and she, I think at that point when I called her, I was that thing that made her come home. 

And so she came home and we started Amber Road. We did that for seven years and it was incredible and I think when you get older and you’ve got kids involved, you’ve got to be flexible, you’ve got to change, you’ve got to pivot and move. And I think at that point I wanted to really push the business and I think Katy was really in a space where she wanted to create a family and step back a little bit. And so that’s kind of, I think, why we ended up separating. 

And that took a long time to decide because it was great and we were finally getting the work we wanted and there was great synergy in what we were producing. But I also think we were a bit naïve in thinking that clients wanted both of our disciplines every time. Landscape is really hard to procure. It’s living based and it always got cut, it was always one of the first things to get removed or it took a 100 years to grow so you could never properly photograph it to show what your capabilities are. So it is a really tough… I have a lot of respect for landscape architects. It’s a very tough industry to promote yourself within because it’s not like every other industry. You’re actually working with living, breathing things that have a life of their own as well. 

So yeah, we went our separate ways in 2020 and the first post went out about YSG on the 20th of the second of 2020, so it was a very auspicious date to start the business. (Laughs)

Amy: Yes and then shortly thereafter a pandemic came crashing down. 

Yasmine: Yes, the pandemic. Pandemic came rolling in - And I remember thinking, wow, is it the pandemic? I’m not getting any telephone calls or is it the fact that I’ve got physic of the unconventional on my website landing page over and over and over again? So I definitely was a little bit worrisome that I had gone down too much of a niche path with my branding but I later realized it’s exactly what I wanted and that was the reasoning behind that, that I wanted to service a specific market, people who really got me and wanted to do something different. 

Amy: Yeah, I’ve heard that from other designers. It can be a hard decision to make because there is an instinct to want to cast a wide net so that you can try new things and meet all kinds of people and secure your future with lots of jobs. But when you are so specific in your branding that you weed out the clients who aren’t going to get you or don’t want what you have to offer, then you just end up with projects that are just way more dreamy.

Yasmine: Totally. 

Amy: Because they’re such a better fit, yeah. 

Yasmine: Absolutely. I’d rather have a handful of amazing things that I want to be doing than a list that’ll last me a lifetime, of really things that don’t excite me. So that’s been working out great, I love it. It’s been awesome. (Laughs)

Amy: Well, and you’ve done some pretty fantastic projects with YSG. Let’s talk about your creative process and maybe through illustrating one of your projects you can also talk because you’ve said that your vision, which makes perfect sense talking to you, is informed by staging storytelling and performance, now that I know about your history, of course it does. So how does this play out in your projects and yeah… And also the Peter Pan, Tinker Bell?

Yasmine: The Peter Pan syndrome (laughter)?

Amy: Yeah. 

Yasmine: We always start our projects with a concept. I know every studio does, but I should… I’m really struggling to figure out how to rename that stage for us because it’s not a concept. It’s the first stage of the project, but I already have in that first stage a complete vision for the space or for the entire venue. So my concepts are really detailed and they have visual representation of what that shell is going to look like by the time we’re done with it in 18 months’ time. So I don’t walk into a space and naturally go, oh my god, this is going to be this and that. 

It is a very emotive response that I provide to the brief and it is very client driven. So none of my outcomes really look the same and they shouldn’t because every brief is different. So I really, I don’t read a lot, this sounds terrible, but I don’t look at magazines. I don’t really look at references that much. 

Amy: I don’t either because it just seems so incestuous-

Yasmine: It really does. 

Amy: I don’t want to look at other chairs to design a new chair that doesn’t make any sense to me. I want my chair to be influenced by a smell or a dream or a thought -

Yasmine: Exactly, exactly and so that’s where our concepts essentially are derived from a moment or a feeling or an emotion, like you said, a dream, a movie scene. So many times I watch something and that evocative scene, or the way the light hits somebody’s face, these kinds of things sound so trivial but they really create such a wealth of inspiration for me. And especially movies, I love movies so much. And so the concept stage is just the most exciting. It’s absolutely incredible and it does happen really quickly. I feel like these things kind of aren’t a long drawn out process for us. 

I really enjoy getting it out really quite quickly. And then we’ll move to like a tendering process. Again, because the vision is really strong in the beginning, there’s very little changes to the design. There is not really a design development stage because everything has really been thought out and considered upfront. Not to say that there’s not things that change down the track, there of course are. But the main stage is really set for the rest of the project. 

So we kind of go through the tendering process and draw it all up for some costings I’m really lucky, I work with the same builder pretty much on every single project. Which is a really beautiful place to be. 

Amy: Those repeat relationships you start to develop a shorthand -

Yasmine: It’s just, you know, I’ve got him on speed dial and I go on holidays with him and his wife and I have a really great relationship with my builder, so I’m very lucky in that way. And so we’ll price it up and we’ll work to a budget and we’ll push and pull and we’ll value engineer and then we’ll do a construction set. And then it’s onto site work and seeing the baby come to life which is just so exciting. So that’s kind of the process from start to finish and we do a multitude of resi and commercial spaces. 

I’ve just started doing offices, which I said I would never do again because I find them quite boring (laughs). But I have done one office for a repeat client whose houses I’ve done and I had to do his office because he’s just got a very different approach to everything and I knew that we could create something really special. And that is really an incredible office space. I can’t believe somebody actually gets to work there, they’re so lucky. 

Amy: Can I back you up to the very first stage where it’s all considered and you’re inspired by movies or a lot of things, but anyway, that initial inspiration then comes out in that initial stage and then forms what the space is going to be. What is the process getting that initial inspiration out of your body and onto the page? 

Yasmine: (Laughs) 3D modelling for us is a really good tool. I know a lot of people don’t bother, but because so much of our work is really sculptural, I find it difficult to draw in 3D to be honest. I need to be able to see if it works around the entire shape, the entire build form. I need to know if it works from this angle or that side. So I literally jump in and use SketchUp as a tool to quickly mass model, figure out proportions, scale and I do my space [lining?] in there. I don’t really use a pen and paper, which is terrible. 

But I just find sometimes when you create something on a paper, it just is never realized the same when you extrude it, when it becomes 3D. So I like to skip that stage and jump into a 3D setting where I can appreciate what these things look like in real life. 

Amy: Thank you for sharing that. I’m thinking of a hospitality project you did called Hotel Collectionist. 

Yasmine: Oh yeah. 

Amy: You said you were inspired by movies. I took a stroll through some of the different rooms because all the rooms are different and they all very much feel like you’re setting this stage for, whoever is spending the night there to sort of live out their own movie.

Yasmine: Yeah, we actually nicknamed it after a pseudo character. 

Amy: I was gonna ask you about some of them because I was reading some of your descriptions and I was like, oh, I like this, it’s sort porn with pops of grandma or Major Tom meets Popeye and I was like, yes, I can feel the story that’s supposed to be happening right now in this room and I want to be a part of it. 

Yasmine: Yeah. 

Amy: And there’s something so, I think, intriguing and exciting and when you do that deliberate contrast with soft porn and floral, with pops of grandma, it’s unexpected and yet it makes you feel like you’re creating your own story within this space that isn’t a cookie cutter of a space you’ve been in before.I think it’s wonderful and the fact that you don’t recognize trends or style, things that are popular, also makes it feel like where am I? I have stumbled into my own subconscious -

Yasmine: Head madness right? 

Amy: Yeah (laughter) and now, what am I going to do here? It’s gonna be so different than what I would do on a normal day in a regular hotel. 

Yasmine: Yeah and I think you asked me earlier what spaces, as a kid, made you want to create this type of interior. And I think it was literally because it was so lacking of all of those things that were super tangible to someone living, like I said, somewhere else, like the States and where these things were accessible. I had to create these things from scratch in order to enjoy these things. I would see a movie, or I would see something in a magazine, but it was probably 10 years behind. I didn’t get things that were off the shelf, immediately written and delivered to a newsstand. I was looking at a magazine from a decade ago. But I’m picking up stuff continually, from different times and melding them into something that I thought was the now. So I didn’t have I think the flavors, the ‘eclecticness’, the mixes, is literally because I was grabbing at so many different things when I was a kid and now I have this really innate ability to mesh things together that sometimes really don’t, or shouldn’t go together, but they end up coming together really quite beautifully because of their complete kookiness. 

They shouldn’t go together but they do. And that’s what I love. And I think the whole mixture, I feel like I’ve always been split. I love interiors, but I love music and dance. I am half Australian, I’m half Egyptian, this constant dark and light thing at play with my personality even. I sound like a crazy person, but I do feel very split. I’m always one foot somewhere else. Like I’m half in, half out, always, with whatever I do. And I do think that makes for an interesting mix at the end of the day, that never feels straight one thing. I don’t think I can ever be straight one thing. 

Amy: I’m thinking about your childhood and the fact that Kuwait was so new and growing up, I remember being fascinated with houses that were old enough to have been sort of renovated a few times, but not completely renovated. So they’d always have this mix of eras, like the tile was from the original, but the wallpaper was updated in the 70s. And they start to take on these layers of history that start to tell a story and sometimes it feels really asynchronous or incongruous but in a beautiful way. It starts to create a really sort of surreal environment where you can feel the history of the house and the people who lived there before. And then you can also feel the choices during each of the renovations and it imprints on your psyche in a way that I think is important in the way that it has layers of time. But in a place that’s so new - Your time is coming in through the asynchronous delivery of media, MTV plus a magazine that’s like 10 years old and you’re layering it up that way because everything is so new in your built environment. I can see how this manifests in your work and why your work is so exciting. That’s amazing. Okay, thank you for spelling that out for me. (Laughs) This is cool. 

Yasmine: I honestly, it’s so nice being able to talk about it because I think, like being asked questions makes you figure out what it is you do and I don’t think unless you asked me that question that I would ever be able to actually remember that that’s what I did, or that’s how it influences my work. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to figure it out too. 

Amy: My pleasure, I love questions, that’s my medium (laughter). I want to ask you a couple of personal questions. You’ve already kind of touched on some of this, but I mean one foot in, one foot out. You’re really drawn to space and how it can be supportive and I’m hearing from you that’s not just functionally supportive. That’s not just aesthetically supportive; it’s almost like enriching the person's imagination with -

Yasmine: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. It’s imagination, exactly. 

Amy: Yeah, and I feel it, I feel it in your work. I think you’re doing an excellent job; by the way, I’ll give you a promotion. 

Yasmine: Oh cool (laughter), thanks. 

Amy: I guess I’m wondering how does living such a nomadic life in your formative years, how does that inform your concept of what home is and what home means? 

Yasmine: That’s why I think it is such an emotive based, like home is a feeling. I don’t honestly know if it’s a physical form, it’s a feeling because I’ve had so many different homes. When I was in Kenya and I arrived and I was kind of… I remember being in my placement and it was quite far away, it was in Masai land and I was living in a Manyatta hut with a family I’d never known before, never met before that day. And I was in the middle of fucking nowhere. 

I had no idea what I was doing. I had no contact with anybody. Anything could have happened. But I remember talking to my mom and she was like, how are you finding it? And I was like, I was a little bit unresponsive to be honest, I didn’t know what to think. There was no running water, there was no electricity, I was really thrown into the deep end. And I did it to myself. 

And literally she called me back like two days later and she said, you sound like a totally different person. I was like, I’m fucking loving it, this is where I’m supposed to be, like this is the best experience I could have ever asked for. And my home was created within two days of being there because of my feelings for it. The way it made me feel and that essentially is how I take the idea of home, is that it’s happiness, it’s calmness, it’s being okay and happy with the way you are. I think that’s all you can ask for. 

Amy: I think you’re right. But I’m also really interested in was that feeling informed by your physical structure or was that feeling something that was in you that you then projected.

Yasmine: I think it was a combination. I love really understated… I’s almost tatty, like really… There is such beauty in nothing, in places that are not adorned, that are just being a room. There is something so beautiful, the way a light hits a wall or a shadow or a single flower out of a degrading vase. There is such beauty in so many of these beautiful, precious moments that someone might not even ever really truly appreciate, unless you love interiors like I do. 

And I think in that very moment of my life, I wanted that. I was seeking that type of appreciation to be really lucky. I’m so lucky and I think I needed reminding of that luckiness and so when I was there and I had nothing, and the family I was living with had nothing, it really made me feel human again.

Amy: That’s so beautiful - the feeling of recapturing humanity in a really essential way, just that essence of it. 

Yasmine: And I think that’s why I want to go back and I always try to remember why I’m doing this. It’s not to make a beautiful house for a really wealthy family, even though that’s great and I love it. I want to do that for people who don’t even know how they would feel if they ever got given that gift, you know? 

Amy: Yeah, yeah. 

Yasmine: So that’s, I feel like it’s on the horizon, when I say something is out there, that’s happening, like in the ether, it’s happening. I feel it and it’s gonna be great and I can’t wait. 

Amy: Do you sing into the walls before you close them up, so they always have your resonance? 

Yasmine: (Laughs) I really like that idea, I don’t. I used to sing out my bedroom window when I was a kid. I used to take a nursery book, or whatever, it wasn’t even a rhyme book and I would sing it to make it sound like a song. And my neighbors used to listen a lot and I didn’t even know they were ever listening and then one day she came home and she’s like, you didn’t… Your daughter didn’t sing today and mom didn’t even know I was doing it. 

And she was like, oh, I didn’t even know my daughter sang, that kind of thing. (Laughter) It’s funny, I always do things where I don’t think people are listening or watching and everyone is always listening and watching, everyone. 

Amy: Well, on your next design project, when the walls are open, before they’re sheet rocked -

Yasmine: I should do it, I love that idea. That is such a great idea, I love it! I can actually see it, like yeah, it’s so great, thanks for that. I love it! That would be a great painting wouldn’t it? That would be such a great painting. 

Amy: It would be. It would also be a beautiful documentary. 

Yasmine: Oh my god, get it going Amy, come on! 

Amy: Let’s do it (laughter). 

Yasmine: Let’s do it, I’m all about it. 

Amy: I want to ask you one more question because I’m really interested in your answer, which is the reason anyone asks any question. You’ve said that moving around so much has helped you develop a speedy adaptability mechanism - And it sounds like even when you were dropped in the middle of nowhere with no running water, you adapted really, really fast. Practically speaking, what does that mean in your body? Is that a mental thing? Is that a… Yeah, is it a global street smarts? How would you describe that?

Yasmine: (Laughs) I don’t know. I’ve had people tell me before that you can talk to anybody. And I do, I find it really easy to talk to absolutely any type of person, no matter who you are, what you do, what profession, where you’ve come from, your background, your ethnicity, your religion. And it does come down from my experience in Kuwait and having been around so many different types of people. And so when I was dropped in Kenya, that was another scenario, that was another life. 

And I feel like I could live a million lives. It’s almost like you pretend like you’re in a movie. I remember feeling those feelings when I was in a… I remember I hadn’t showered in like a week and it was my first bucket shower. You had to go into this little room and it was all mud, but outside the window, this very tiny window, was out to these gorgeous, green, luscious fields. And out this little peephole window I saw this sheet, this bed sheet blowing in the wind, drying in the sun. 

Just catching the breeze really softly and it was dancing as I was having my shower and it was just such a pivotal… It sounds so stupid, but I felt like I was in a movie. Like I was in this crazy situation, I hadn’t showered and I actually really enjoyed being dirty for once, instead of having to have a shower for the sake of having a shower. I was filthy (laughs) and I just remember, all this stuff coming off of me feeling just so thankful for the water. 

You get so conditioned into certain feelings and what you should do in a day and I didn’t shower. That wasn’t part of my makeup that day. And so when I got to do it and it was fresh, it was exciting. It made that mundane activity amazingly fresh on so many levels (laughs).  There’s so much opportunity to change up your everyday and not be taking things for granted and I think that makes a big difference, is being able to step into someone else’s shoes for a minute and be appreciative of what you have. 

And then experience their life in their way and it is like being in a whole new world, whether it’s good or bad, it’s new and I think people should try and do it more often. 

Amy: you’ve got one foot, you’ve always got one foot in and one foot out, which makes you kind of an insider and an outsider in any given moment. And so you always have that opportunity to get a fresh perspective, just by flipping the switch, from being an insider to an outsider. 

Yasmine: Yeah, I feel like I’m pretty voyeuristic, but then I’m not at the same time. There’s a term that needs to exist for that very person that kind of bridges both worlds and I feel like I’m that kind of thing. 

Amy: I don’t know what the word is for that, we need to figure out what that is (laughter).

Yasmine: No, I’m a very visual person and I think I’m a very photography based or movie based, still cinematography is incredible. I always get locked into moments. I remember when I was a kid I would be washing dishes and I would be having a monologue with myself, like I’m the poor girl washing dishes at the sink, looking lovingly through the window out to my future. Like all of these things I did. I was re-enacting moments of films that I loved or again, because of… There was that one English movie during the day that I would get to watch when I lived in Cairo, when I was really small and mom didn’t speak Arabic, so that was the one thing we did that day, was be able to watch Arnie, Arnold Schwarzenegger on the television. It was the one movie that was in English. And I think I had such attraction to movies for that reason, because they were special, they were like, it’s a moment. So I get stuck on things, I get stuck on movie scenes, for sure. I know the words to a lot of movies because I’ve seen them so many times. I watch things, Woody Allen movies in the background, if I have a deadline; I have that in the background. My husband hates Woody Allen, but I fucking love it. 

Amy: What are you looking forward to right now? Other than your life unfolding in really wonderful ways? 

Yasmine: My business is growing exponentially quickly. My team, we’ve grown from four people to 12 in the last six months and the project types that we’re getting are just really exciting and I’m working in the Middle East, which is so great. I got my first job in LA the other day. And I think I’m really just enjoying the idea that maybe some of my ideas and passions might make it across the oceans to other parts of the world and expand our office into some new territory. 

Amy: Yeah, it sounds like you’re well on your way and you’re one foot inside your 40s, so (laughter) -

Yasmine: I’m dreading 49; I’ll be half in and half out (laughter). 

Amy: No, it just keeps getting better. 

Yasmine: Does it?

Amy: I’ve heard a lot of people say yes because the freedom that you start to enjoy in your 40s just continues because you give fewer fucks and you’re less apologetic for any of that. Who knows what’s gonna happen with the world (laughs), I can’t promise you that that gets better. But I do think that life gets a lot more interesting with the more wisdom and experience you have. As long as you position yourself so that you’re still able to capitalize on all of this fresh perspective, that is so crucial to your love of life - I don’t think I could be one of those people that just parks myself somewhere and I don’t have any children, so I’m teaching now at the university level and teaching is like getting fresh access to all of this really, really exciting, youthful inspiration and I’m really, really enjoying that. Well, I’m super excited for everything that is coming down the road for you and I know that… and you’ll be seeing the world with fresh perspective as you always do. 

Yasmine: I’m very excited for that and thank you so much for having me Amy, as I said earlier, this is like, I think, third month lockdown and I’m always up for a good conversation. This was just what I needed, so thank you so much. 

Amy: Thank you for listening! To see images of Yasmine and her work, read the show notes. Click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. If you like what we do here at Clever, you can support us by subscribing on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple or wherever you are listening right now… By telling your friends about us, we would really love to share these stories far and wide and by clicking our sponsor links in the episode description - helping our sponsors helps us keep creating this show. We also when you share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - you can find us @cleverpodcast. You can find me, @amydevers Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows. They curate the best of them, so you don’t have to. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk

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What is your earliest memory?

My bedroom in Saudi Arabia. It was green and I had a date tree right outside my window. I used to play a mini piano underneath the window and stare at it.  I have a terrible memory though, I must have been about 4?

How do you feel about democratic design?  

Like I said, I’m a girl made of two very distinctive halves. The ‘democratic’ side of me says hell yes, design for the people! But then my other side – the side that really loves detail and high end finishes, well she says no – make it sing who cares how much for? Like most things, I always sit in the middle. 

As a designer you need to design to a brief, to a market. A good designer designs for both.

Yasmine singing at her friend Tim’s house in Kuwait.

Yasmine at her high school graduation in Kuwait.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten? 

Never not do something out of fear. 

How do you record your ideas? 

I don’t really, I have a big head.  Sometimes they go on small ripped up bits of paper, that I usually loose under mountains of paper on my desk. 

Yasmine with her band, The Conversations

Yasmine with her band, The Conversations

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

I found this incredible Aurtsaln artist who works with algae bioplastics, syuper sustainable  

What book is on your nightstand?

Currently reading. The Witch's Herbal Apothecary. If only I had time to read, I’ve reverted to spells.

Why is authenticity in design important?

There’s enough fakeness in today’s world no?

Yasmine in Kenya doing volunteer work

Yasmine with her siblings

Favorite restaurant in your city?

I really love Hubert’s. It’s a basement place in the city with jazz bands on Thursdays and great French food 

What might we find on your desk right now?

Empty cup of tea, cords, 2 stone samples, bank card, lots of pens and a mini ceramic peacock from my sister.

Who do you look up to and why?

Anyone running their own business. It’s hard. I have a soft spot for my mate and design college David Flack. 

YSG Studio project, Crane in the Sky

Hotel Collectionist

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

My installation at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2018 called it ‘Take it Outside’. I built my dreams 

What are the last five songs you listened to? 

A playlist from Attawalpa [Lena Dunhams muso hubby – he’s great] called ‘Daily Mix’ 

YSG Studio project, Laminex

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

Insta @ysg.studio 
Web www.ysg.studio

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Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Ilana Nevins and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.

Clever is a proud member of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows.

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