Holly Hollingsworth Phillips’ design training began at age twelve when she would tag along with her mother, an interior designer, on buying trips to Europe. She would eventually follow in her mom’s professional footsteps, but Phillips’ design career has taken a strikingly different path. “My style is more contemporary than my mom’s,” Phillips explains, “and I am drawn to color.”
This is apparent the moment you walk through the front door of Phillips’ Eastover home, which she moved into eighteen months ago. Her parents built the house, described by Phillips as “super traditional, super Williamsburg,” in 1963 and furnished it with fine antiques, rugs, and art that complemented the colonial style of the home. While the exterior remains unchanged, the interior has taken a much brighter turn. “I didn’t want to change the outside,” Phillips says, “but I wanted to make the inside my own.”
With three teenage children and two dogs, Phillips and her husband wanted a bright, welcoming, and comfortable home. Her first priority was renovating and expanding the kitchen, which was tiny. “I knew I wanted a giant island, I knew I wanted a cooking range framed with refrigerators on each side, and I knew I wanted to use this fabric,” Phillips says, pointing to the breakfast room draperies. “I was obsessed with the purple and orange.”
Phillips nearly always begins a project with selecting fabrics because they are the focal point of a room. She encourages clients to use the existing furniture they love—and the same applies to her own home. She’s had the same breakfast chairs, upholstered in lime green vinyl, since her children were toddlers. The hot pink barstools at the island are also upholstered in vinyl. “With three kids and bad dogs, the vinyl is practical,” Phillips states.
Aside from the kitchen, the Phillips family spends most of their time in the cozy, wood-paneled den. Phillips wanted to keep the wood, which her parents salvaged from an old barn, but she had the walls painted white to lighten the room and create a neutral background for her colorful furniture and art. Plenty of seating was a must, so she started with a large ten-foot sofa upholstered in a vibrant chartreuse velvet and filled with boldly colored pillows. “This pillow fabric was the starting point for the den,” Phillips shares. “I saw it and knew I had to have all those colors.”
Always mindful of blending old and new, Phillips kept two antique chests that were originally in the room, adding her modern flair with gold-based Bernhardt swivel chairs, an acrylic backgammon table, and an oversized mid-century-style coffee table featuring a sunken bar, which makes for easy entertaining.
The dining room, featuring glossy black lacquer and vivid pops of color, is the most dramatic room in the house. Phillips worked with renowned muralist Paul Montgomery to design the handpainted chinoiserie wallpaper. Starting with a black background, she envisioned a large-scale mural with blue peonies. “Then I asked Paul to add purple and a few other colors, then elephants, tigers, giraffes, and people,” Phillips reflects. “Then Paul asked if he could add monkeys and butterflies, so I said ‘Sure! More is more!’” Montgomery plans to incorporate the wallpaper design into his line.
She replaced her parents’ rectangular mahogany table with a sleek oval Julian Chichester table in a dark finish, surrounding it with chairs upholstered in a Ralph Lauren tiger fabric. “I’ve had those chairs since I moved back to Charlotte in 1999,” Phillips avers. “I love animal print anything, and they go with everything.”
A stark contrast to the dining room, the living room walls are covered in a subdued, cream-colored grasscloth by Thibaut. The color creates the perfect backdrop for her art, including four Jamali pieces that were a wedding gift and brightly colored paintings by Sally King Benedict and Amanda Stone Talley.
The stately antique chinoiserie secretary is something Phillips had been coveting for years and finally purchased recently at an auction in Columbia, South Carolina. The white scalloped tub chairs were relocated from her daughter’s room. “We needed some chairs there for a party, and those worked, so we haven’t moved them,” she explains.
She already owned the two sofas, one purple and one upholstered in the same tiger print as the dining room chairs. “This one has a huge candle wax stain, and this one is where the dog sits all the time,” she says.
Phillips’ realistic approach to decorating a home makes sense for active families like her own. “Things are going to happen, and furniture will get beat up and torn up,” she states. “I don’t move things, and I let the dogs and kids sit wherever they want.”
Phillips’ goal for clients is for them to use every room they have. She is a fan of performance fabrics that are durable and can withstand the wear and tear of everyday living. “Your home always needs to be comfortable, even your formal room,” she says. “Live in your house and don’t quarantine the kids and dogs to a certain area.”
Most of Phillips’ clients don’t prefer as much color as she does. She’s even had clients who have asked for a completely neutral palette. Each house presents a new challenge, but she strives to create a space that delivers happiness. “I have to balance it more for clients than I do for myself,” she admits, “but layering colors and patterns makes me happy.”