Inside Jenny Holladay’s Turn-of-the-Century Chicago Townhouse...

“I love crusty old homes!” declares Chicago designer Jenny Holladay. While the Lincoln Park home that she shares with her husband, Whit, and two young children, ages six and three, is indeed old—the building dates back to the late 1880s—it is by no means crusty. In fact, it’s positively bursting at the seams with a garden’s worth of botanical prints in a spectrum of hues that might as well have been specifically prescribed as an antidote to the city’s famously long, dreary winters. An eight-year veteran of Summer Thornton Design, Holladay found herself in possession of the four-bedroom Victorian as the result of an assiduous house-hunting campaign. Determined to find a home in Lincoln Park that maintained its turn-of-the-century charm—“that gave me that jittery feeling inside of excitement and potential,” as she puts it—Holladay began dropping letters in the mailboxes of several promising-looking homes, asking if their owners might be willing to sell. When one wrote back, Holladay leapt to secure the