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. (Surprisingly, this was not her biggest design regret!)
“It was a little bit of a disaster… but we took what the judges said on board and we applied it straight away, so we were able to turn it around really fast and win the most room reveals and challenges out of any other couple on The Block.”
Lysandra Fraser
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.
All of Lysandra’s career gambles have paid off, with she and Alisa becoming an authority on modern farmhouse interiors, and expanding al.ive body into skincare. This is a mogul’s journey worth listening to.
“We had that mindset of… we thought we knew… that we were good at design. But no, as far as experience goes, no, absolutely not.”
Lysandra Fraser
Listen now: This episode of The Edit is available via the iHeart app, homebeautiful.com.au, or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch below or listen here. /
The Edit podcast from the team at Home Beautiful is supported by OZ Design and Luxaflex.
A space to connect and belong to a growing group of our audience who want to go behind the scenes of our glossy pages to discover exactly what makes a house a home.
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