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FeedPrep Rally
A Villanova home embodies a chic mom’s youthful take on tradition.
Photos by John Lewis Published June 25, 2009 at 03:32 PM
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When asked about her decorating style, Priscilla Fenlin pauses. “Traditional,” she finally says. “A young traditional.” 
Fenlin recalls how someone else described her home: preppy chic. “She’s a very good friend of mine whose taste I admire,” says Fenlin, who handled all the interior design work in the house. “So I was happy with that description.”
As it turns out, the description fits. In every room, Fenlin paired traditional furnishings with tasteful accessories, colorful paint and rich fabrics for personality and depth. The young family is hip, stylish and social, and the home reflects their lifestyle.
Fenlin’s flair for color is most apparent in the living room. “It was the first room I designed,” she says. “And it’s the one I’ve struggled with the most.”
Initially, Fenlin wanted to replicate a soft apple-green shade she saw in a catalog. “It looked so bright and happy in the picture,” she says.
But when she saw the color on her walls, Fenlin wasn’t as sure. “I hesitated in changing it at first because everyone said how much they loved the color,” she says.
In the end, Fenlin went with a deep olive green, which makes the white moldings, fireplace mantle and silk dupioni window treatments pop. “It needed that strong contrast,” she says.
The green walls provide an inviting backdrop for the caramel-colored sofa and the octagonal, gold-leaf-framed Hickory Chair mirror hanging above it. Welcome splashes of red come in the lamp shades, throw pillows and an oil painting of vibrant red poppies.
A set of club chairs in a Chinese toile fabric brings pattern into the room, and a basket-weave sisal rug covers the hardwood floor. “I really love Chinoiserie, and I’ve used it throughout the house in subtle ways—like on the chairs,” says Fenlin.
When Fenlin and her husband were house hunting back in 2005, they weren’t in the market for a home that needed major renovations. “I was pregnant with our first child,” she says. “This was also our first house, so we didn’t want to be overwhelmed.”
After years of apartment living in New York and Philadelphia, the Fenlins also knew they’d have additional rooms to furnish, so it helped that the Cape home they found was within their price range and in move-in condition.
Still, the house needed a few cosmetic changes. For one, its walls were almost entirely white, off-white or a variation of cream. “The only color was in what’s now my son’s bedroom,” she says.
That neutral backdrop made it easy for Fenlin to visualize the shades she wanted to use throughout. And though she had no previous interior design experience, Fenlin embraced the project. “I always enjoyed decorating our apartments in the city,” she says. “But since we were only renting, I didn’t want to invest in anything permanent.”
Within days of closing on her new home, Fenlin was in North Carolina picking out furniture and fabrics. She found the perfect traditional mahogany dining set complete with a sideboard and corner hutch. Back home, she added extra panache with a leopard-patterned Robert Allen fabric for the window treatments, a Thibaut Strie wallpaper in Nantucket red above the chair rail, and a sisal rug bordered with a berry-red Lee Jofa leopard-print needlepoint fabric.
The wild-animal motif carries over to a set of leopard-print lamps with black silk-string shades on the sideboard, and two candlesticks shaped like leopards. “It was Dorothy Draper who said, ‘Every well-dressed home needs an animal print in it,’” says Fenlin. “I feel the same way.”
