What other designer could describe her latest project as a “choose-your-own-adventure holiday home where trippy interior landscapes entice you down utopian rabbit holes, and fairy tale-like curiosities are framed by deep thresholds that lure the eye from room to room?” Since founding YSG Studio just five years ago, the Sydney, Australia–based designer Yasmine Ghoniem has transfixed the design world with both her bold interiors and the equally bold words she uses to describe them.
Ghoniem recently renovated a big, bland house a few hours south of Sydney. She named it for its profusion of floral and arboreal patterns: Plantasia. Asked to turn the vaguely colonial 1990s house into a getaway for a creative couple with two children, she decided to make it an escape not just from the city, but from earth. “I wanted it to feel like an other-worldly utopia you could only visit in your dreams,” she recalled.
Luckily, the clients are “rule breakers, not rule makers,” Ghoniem said. The husband is a well-known comedian, actor, and writer; the wife is the founder of a successful skincare brand and award-winning children’s book author. They were after a “welcome-to-the-funhouse feeling,” Ghoniem reported. And because this house, nestled among rolling hills sprinkled with citrus groves, is not their full-time residence, the designer didn’t need to play it safe.
In the house’s previous incarnation, rooms were so similar as to be indistinguishable. In her version of the house, she said, “I want each of them to stop you in your tracks.”
The renovation involved little actual construction—Ghoniem redid the bathrooms and turned the living room fireplace into a mosaic of Zellige tiles in colors like spearmint, arctic, and shiraz. (In front, a two-toned sofa recalls her line of striped hardware for Bankston.) Elsewhere, dramatically patterned wallpaper enlivens once-dull rooms.
Shapes are as important to Ghoniem as surfaces. That’s true even at the oversized front door, painted a bright butter yellow and outfitted with semi-circular brass pulls from V.Brokkr. Both the color and the arcs foreshadow what’s inside, including intense hues and generously curved lines on everything from the skirted settee in the parlor to the kitchen’s vintage rattan stools to the chubby bullnose edges on counters and shelves, a way of making hard materials look soft, she said. The dining room is a chair menagerie, the kitchen a space oddity, with a heavy skirted lamp dominating the island, like a single palm tree growing out of an atoll.
The clients wanted bedrooms that were dark, escapist sanctuaries. So, Ghoniem opted for “color drenching” in “broody” hues like merlot red and absinthe green. Most dramatic is the primary bedroom, where autumnal foliage drips down the walls. “An eerie Twin Peaks melancholy draws you in,” she said. Oddly, sky blue is reserved for the carpet underfoot. Stripes run overhead. Ceilings matter to Ghoniem; immersion, after all, requires every surface to participate. And in bedrooms, she said, “Think about how much time you spent there in a horizontal position. There should be a reward for looking up.”
Her clients wanted bathrooms that “make you want to float for hours,” Ghoniem recalled. In the primary bathroom, a freestanding porcelain bathtub is the place to do that. “It is hard not to succumb to a zesty old tingle of delight when you spot the rounded sherbet yellow tub perched beneath a cascading canopy of citrus fruits,” she said.
The walls that aren’t fruited are covered in handmade Moroccan tiles that bounce light everywhere. And there are many more bullnoses. In bathrooms,” she ventured, “these rounded shapes make you feel held in a beautiful embrace.”
Ghoniem, born in Kuwait, had a nomadic childhood before studying in the U.S. at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She moved to Australia to work as a musician but eventually took a job as a designer. Now she is a superstar in that field.
Plantasia “is considerably louder, in terms of color and pattern,” than most of her work, she said, but, “the aim of all of the spaces I create is to elicit an emotional response. This is one of the ways to do that.”