Every week, our House Calls feature takes you into homes with great style, big personality, and ineffable soul. Today, we look at the Chapel Hill, North Carolina home of Allison Sloan Polish, the president of Spoonflower, a company that gained international acclaim by giving customers the ability to design or customize fabric and wallpaper and then print their creations. Polish used her own home as a laboratory for the concept, filling it with colorful prints, quirky collections, and features designed to spark the imagination of her family. Her home in Chapel Hill?s Greenwood neighborhood is the epitome of the modern farmhouse look, and Polish?s creative flourishes have tailored it to her family. When Polish speaks about the place and her affection for it, it seems like design destiny. But the truth is that it almost didn?t happen. Polish and her family?husband Jeff and sons Jackson (10), Dillon (8), and Maddox (6)?were living in another home, one that was perfectly fine, but Polish desired something else. "I wanted a bigger yard and, to be honest, another design project," she says. "It was an idea I had to sell my husband on."
A year ago, they found a house they both agreed on, and they made a bid on it. "The night we finally put an offer in on a house that I had been coveting, I went home and started thinking about this house in the Greenwood neighborhood that I had seen online a month or more earlier but never visited," she says. "...