Angeline Guido Hall designs a future for her brand

Angeline Guido Hall is a Lake Highlands native who watched her parents erect homes throughout the neighborhood. Since then, she’s followed their footsteps and built an award-winning brand of her own.

Her company, Angeline Guido Design, has been recognized as a top studio by Architectural Digest. She’s worked with clients in Lake Highlands, in addition to projects in Washington, D.C., Maryland and New York. Residential design is the studio’s bread and butter, but AGD also designs hospitality concepts like Smokey Rose, hotels and office spaces.

She watched as her parents built the white stucco houses on Green Oaks Drive between Royal Lane and Whitehurst Drive on Greenville Avenue. Guido was a homecoming queen at Lake Highlands High School. She also participated in student council, cheer and track.

At graduation, she already knew design and building was her calling. Her father gave her two options: either he would pay for college or help her start her own design business. Guido chose the former, attending Texas Christian University’s design school.

She first entered the field as a design assistant at Looney & Associates’ Dallas office, a hospitality-focused firm where she worked primarily with hotel design. The economic downturn in 2008 caused Guido to leave the firm. She eventually found work as a designer for Sambuca Restaurant Group before moving to her last corporate gig at M Crowd Restaraunt Group.

In 2014, after a few years moonlighting residential design on the side, Guido struck out on her own to launch Angeline Guido Designs. She has 11 designers and business managers on her team, and isn’t shy about giving them credit. In fact, AGD will soon undergo a rebrand to reflect the collaborative spirit its principal designer proudly touts.

These days, Guido lives in Heath, a small encalve on the edge of of Lake Ray Hubbard, with her husband and two children. They spend their time attending youth sports events, relaxing with friends and posting Instagram reels to the AGD Instagram account. Appearances by her father, Carmen, have become a fan favorite.

We caught up with Guido to talk about growing up in Lake Highlands, her career, design and the future of her firm.

What was it like growing up in Lake Highlands?

There are so many things I love about Lake Highlands. It’s like this small community within the city, where it’s such a great location, and there’s all these great little pockets of neighborhoods. Lake Highlands is just such a proud town, they’re just proud of their school and their Wildcats. Everybody is so involved in the community. I remember I was a cheerleader, any time that we did parades or anything like that, there was always a huge turnout. There’s a lot of Lake Highlands pride in Lake Highlands.

Did you always know you wanted to follow your parents into the business?

I just never wanted to do anything else. I grew up on the job site and showroom. So when my parents were building together, my mom ran a lot of the site operations and client communication. My dad really focused on a lot of the early architectural stuff and the budgets. I was with my mom a lot, so I was always on the job site with her meeting with subcontractors, she would put me in my little pink bicycle helmet. I would draw the slaps while she would meet with the electrician or whatever. It’s very familiar; the smell of sheet rock is something that is very nostalgic. When I go into a job site and it’s at the stage where they’re putting the sheetrock mud on, it brings me back to my childhood.

What did you enjoy about designing restaurants?

You think about the connections that are made over meals. People utilize restaurants for so many things. It could be a baby shower. It could be an anniversary dinner. It could be someone’s first date night that they’ve had together, and they end up getting married. All these very sentimental things happen within restaurants. That’s a very special thing to be a part of, that you’re creating this environment for people to make these memories, much like you do for a home. There’s a lot of these commonalities and common threads that run through my background in hospitality that I feel like I get to utilize and bring into the world of residential.

How do you want your clients to feel after completing a project?

I want them to say that it was fun. And yes, there may have been some stressful points because building a house or remodeling or whatever it might be, in general, is just stressful. There’s a lot of money involved. There’s a lot of decisions. I want them to look back and say that was money well spent, and I had a good time. And we’re very relaxed, and it’s a very lighthearted environment in my office. I want people to feel at home and that they are a friend because at the end of the day, I want to be able to want to go to dinner with every one of my clients at the end of a project, then I want to know that they feel the same way about me, and so whatever that takes to make them happy in the end is what we’re doing.

As the firm has grown, how have you encouraged collaboration?

As my business grows and as I’ve grown more into the principal designer role, it took some time, but I really had to allow myself to let go a little bit of some stuff in order for my team to have more ownership of projects. So I’m still involved in every project that comes through the doors of our office, unless it’s strictly just a furnishings project. I’m still very much involved in the design process, in formulating the direction of the design, setting up that client relationship, getting the client comfortable and making sure that I feel really good, that my team has a very good understanding of the direction of the design before we get into the guts of actually putting the design together. So in those early concept phases is when I’m very involved, and then I have to allow myself to kind of step away a little bit during the design development and let them kind of do their thing.

What principles guide your designs?

The common thread, no matter the style of the project, is that there’s always a very inviting, layered, livable look to all of our designs, whether it’s traditional and colorful or it is more modern and monochrome, there’s still these layers of texture and it looks comfortable, inviting and livable, and that’s how I want all of our projects to look.

Your dad and husband are frequent features on your Instagram account. Willing participants?

My husband is more twist his arm. He doesn’t love to be plastered all over the internet, but he obliges. My dad, on the other hand, he’s a character. He is very aware that he has a lot of social media fans from my Instagram, and he loves it. He just had open heart surgery, and the amount of prayers that were coming in for him through my DMs, because I shared that he was having surgery, asking for prayers — I mean, it was amazing.

What does the future look like for AGD?

I just want to stay on the same trajectory that we’re on. I don’t have any huge, big aspirations. I love where we’re at right now. I just want us to continue to just grow at the rate that we are. We’ve talked about the possibility of a staff member who’s like jonesing to move out to the Northeast, that might be something. We’re currently going through a total rebrand of the business right now, so that’s really exciting. We’re changing the name and also getting a new website, new logo. It’s not just about me anymore. It’s about the collaborative studio that I have. So we’re kind of rebranding a bit to lean into that a little bit more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.