I met Angelo at the Roger Williams Hotel, whose lobby was nicely and moderately designed with pops of color. I was a nervous dork wreck, as he’s one of my favorite designers: have you ever seen his home? It’s amazing. I never mentioned that his home is on my list of favorites cause I didn’t want to be too “uncool”. But, ever since that HGTV Christmas special when he had a cookie party, I’ve admired his design aesthetic. Anyway, he’s super nice, totally down to earth, and gracious. Oh, and he’s a self-proclaimed “Design Geek”.

Besides his new line called angelo:HOME, which I’ve already written about on ShelterPop, I had a few questions for Angelo that I thought would be really fun to post here on DM. Check out some more pics of his new line & some fun facts after the jump.

First of all, he collects squirrels and that is just odd. Apparently it’s just some sort of recent compulsion with no history behind it other than “I like squirrels”. Well, I guess he’s never lived in my apartment building because the ones we have are highly-trained attack squirrels (or, “Jersey squirrels” as we call them here).

Every designer has moments of shame, you know like mirrored lacquer furniture, a tiki basement disaster, or the dreaded metallic 1970s metallic wallpaper on the walls and ceiling of a small rust shag carpeted bathroom. I had to ask Angelo about his most embarrassing design moment. When he was 11, he went out, bought mallard duck wallpaper and wood trim and single-handedly wallpapered his bedroom and installed a chair rail. I was disturbed, yet intrigued and thought, maybe he was really into hunting? He said he had a thing for ducks. OK, fair enough.

I wanted to find out more about where he shops and which designers he really enjoys because we all love to know that even HGTV designers love to shop where we do! We both agree that Target and Crate and Barrel (& CB2) are the tops. Locally (LA), he enjoys shopping at HD Buttercup, Gibson, and Kohlman Quinn (who recently closed its doors, but we hope they’ll get an online shop up and running asap!).

Now you know just a little bit more about Angelo, and I hope that you take some time to check out his new line, his blog, and on Twitter.