If only he’d gone to Ikea!

Or had his family’s carpenters around!

Determined to showcase his furniture design skills, Nathan Galui, our hometown design hero, decided to design — and build — his own entertainment center for this week’s challenge: Homes of the Brave, designing family rooms for two Los Angeles-area military families.
Palm Beach Gardens native Galui, whose grandfather is developer Otto “Buzz” DiVosta and whose father, Gene Galui, is also a home builder, was a contestant on HGTV’s Design Star reality show. The winner gets his or her own show on the network.

And yes, that does read “was a contestant.”

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And now there are six.

Even in the face of last week’s surprise double elimination, our local design star sailed on, although the judges thought both teams’ garage projects were lackluster.

Nathan Galui, a Palm Beach Gardens designer, is competing on HGTV’s Design Star reality show for a chance to have his own show on the network. He’s proving to be a stable, steady presence in the face of the other contestants’ increasingly diva-esque behavior.

Acknowledging that we’re all having to get more living out of our homes, the show’s producers came up with a garage challenge: The designers broke into two teams and had 20 hours and $10,000 to turn two real families’ garages into living spaces.

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“Extremely balanced.” “Really clever.” “I love it.”

Those were a few of the judges’ comments Aug. 2 on Nathan Galui’s latest Design Star project on HGTV.

The Palm Beach Gardens resident, who won the first two challenges, was competing against eight other designers in a Design Star staple: the white room challenge.

Each designer was presented with a white cubicle, containing only a sofa, tables and shelves, and told to make it fabulous.

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The judges loved him!

Our native son, Palm Beach Gardens designer Nathan Galui, is one of 11 — well, down to 10 now — designers competing for their own HGTV show on the network’s Design Star. The show’s fourth season began July 19. Read the full story

When we last left our local hero, he was sailing on lavish praise from the judges.

This week, they knocked a bit of wind from his sails.

Nathan Galui, Palm Beach Gardens’ 25-year-old contestant in HGTV’s Design Star series, led a team of four other designers as they had three days to transform a real-life family’s Los Angeles kitchen for the show’s “dueling kitchen challenge.”

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Designer Natahan Galui, 25, at home Tuesday in Palm Beach Gardens. Staff photo by Bill Ingram/PBPulse

When you’re the grandson of Palm Beach County developer Otto “Buzz” DiVosta and son of another home builder, chances are you know which is the business end of a hammer.

But Nathan Galui would rather nail down a great room design than a 2 X 4. Last spring, the budding designer from Palm Beach Gardens got a chance to show whether he’s also got the tools to be an HGTV star on the fourth season of the network’s Design Star reality show.

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