Inside Homes - Washington Life Magazine - November 2014

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Tracey Thomm and Timothy Chi in the family living room with daughters Felicity, Mara and Riley.

% &EPERGIH %TTVSEGL Serial startup entrepreneur Timothy Chi and his wife Tracey Thomm seamlessly blend work and family life in their gracious Bethesda residence.

BY ANNE KIM-DANNIBALE PHOTOS BY JOSEPH ALLEN

HOME LIFE | INSIDE HOMES

ntering Timothy Chi and Tracey Thomm’s residence, a visitor quickly learns to step out of the way of the sound of tiny feet rumbling down the hallway like a tornado toward a family photo. Riley, age 6, and Mara, 3, lead the charge toward the well-appointed family room with 11-month-old Felicity gaining fast on tiny hands and knees, a Usain Bolt for the diaper set. Add a nanny, assistants and a photographer to the mix and you’ve got quite a crowd.

A full house is nothing new for the couple. Timothy started the tech company Wedding Wire — a kind of Yelp or TripAdvisor for the multibillion-dollar wedding industry — out of their first house, a Chevy Chase domicile exploding in pink that accommodated first a handful of workers but soon expanded to include more than a dozen coders, salesmen and interns going in and out at all hours of the day.

“It must have been weird particularly in the beginning,” Timothy recalls. “My wife would leave in the morning and then a couple of cars would pull up. They’d leave and then my wife would come home. At one point we had like 10 people.”

“We had 13 when we lost it,” Tracey interjects goodnaturedly. “I’d go grocery shopping three times a week for our family and the food would be gone in two days. I couldn’t say anything because it was the spirit of the startup.

It was very communal. It’s a family.”

A former investment banker who met Timothy while the two worked on his first company, Blackboard, Tracey knew what she was getting into. But with a fast-growing business

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PREVIOUS PAGE (clockwise from top left): In its previous incarnation, the gourmet kitchen extended across the hall into what is now the dining room. Its new configuration provides ample space for family dinners while leaving room for a formal dining room; the master suite is a roomy retreat with Tracey Thomm’s office in an adjoing sitting room; a Kelyne painting from Allouche Gallery in New York is highlighted in the dining room; one of the only rooms where Timothy was allowed to weigh in, his office features custom-wrapped quartersawn unstained white oak, showcasing a Marcel Mouly painting from Allouche Gallery.

Mouly died in 2008 but was the last living artist to paint with Picasso. The model depicted in the painting is a Picasso model; a reproduction Terra Cotta Warrior forged from the very same clay in which its original counterparts stand watch over the tomb of Chinese Emperor Qin. The weighty soldier was sent by shipping container and loaded up with the help of many friends.

The Chi girls delight in dressing him up for various holidays.

THIS PAGE (clockwise from top left): The Colonial-style house sits on a treelined street in Bethesda; the dining room exemplifies Tracey’s creativity, employing Raoul Textiles fabric as wallpaper and Rose Tarlow linen curtains; the cheerful first-floor powder room sparkles with a Howard Elliot Lancelot mirror against a Pierre Frey pattern.

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pushing the limits of their personal lives, they moved the company to an office space and in 2010 purchased their current residence, a 4,700-square-foot Creamsicle-colored nest on a tree-lined Bethesda street.With their first daughter born and a second on the way, they decided to take things slowly leaving everything in the six-bed, six-bath Colonial as it was, preventing a repeat of the design mistakes they felt they made with their first house.

“We stuck to our guns and lived for two years with just primer on the walls,” Tracey recalls.

At issue was finding a cohesive style and figuring out what worked for their growing family. “We really considered the fact that 50 percent of the people who lived here were under the age of 3,” Tracey, a real estate agent, adds. “The house had to be useful. Every square inch.”

The ground floor was reconfigured to reflect Tracey’s traditional tastes with separate rooms for cooking, dining and spending time with the family — no open plans here.

Designers Andrew Law and Gore Dean were brought on to help execute her vision, which she calls “traditional transitional” in a pleasing palette of soft blues, creams and earth tones.

Accustomed to leading the charge in the office, her husband took a back seat during this stage of the family’s evolution. “The good thing about us is that Tim doesn’t want to be involved, he doesn’t care. So, we had very few fights about it,”Tracey says.

“I’ll offer my opinion but I’ll always caveat it with you should pretty much ignore whatever comes out of my mouth,” Timothy jokes.

The result is a gracious house dressed up enough for dinner parties yet comfortable for sticky fingers and a sprouting trio of energetic girls (one of whom, Timothy hopes, will make use of the basketball court out back). It’s a residence that suits a modern family, with Timothy retreating to his home office after the girls’ bedtime and waking up at dawn to shepherd his brood toward a new day. After a hectic schedule at a bustling startup for Tim and an equally full schedule for Tracey, the family reconvenes for one constant since Wedding Wire was founded

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— family dinners. “It’s a real foundational piece because even though we both work a lot of hours there’s always something very routine and familiar for our kids,”Timothy says.

That philosophy is rooted in the founding of the company and still extends today. Though the nuptials marketplace has more than 400 employees, the company maintains its personal connection with an annual holiday “white elephant” gift exchange party and a potluck Thanksgiving. It helps, too, that the CEO, whose family immigrated from Taiwan in the ’70s, makes it a point to know every single employee by first name. “It’s not about work versus life, it’s work and life,” he notes.

“You have to work really hard at it because it’s important,” he adds. “That’s what people want — to work at a company where it doesn’t have to feel like work. That’s the foundation for a healthy corporate culture.”

Not to mention a healthy family life.

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