Mudan Interior Design is a boutique, high-end design firm creating thoughtful, family-centered homes throughout Bethesda and the greater Washington, DC area. Behind it is Esther Chi, who guides every project personally — from the first conversation to the final detail.
Her belief is as simple one: the best homes begin not with style, but with a real understanding of the people who will live in them.
Good residential interior design, in Esther’s view, has less to do with a signature look than with judgment — knowing which decisions matter most, and why.
Before a layout is drawn or a finish is chosen, she wants to understand how a family actually lives. A household with young children needs something different from empty nesters preparing to downsize; a century-old Colonial asks different questions than a newly built home. The most beautiful room in the world isn’t successful if it doesn’t support the life happening inside it.
From there, the work becomes a series of thoughtful trade-offs. A custom home or whole-home renovation can involve hundreds of decisions, and rarely does any one of them have a single perfect answer. Esther’s role is to help families weigh those choices with confidence and in the right order — so no one is choosing a faucet before the kitchen’s layout is settled. She isn’t there to impose her taste. She’s there to help you decide well.
“Esther would relate to us the pros and cons of any key decisions we had to make. We never felt pressured, but rather supported by her professionalism.”
That judgment was earned. Esther trained first as a sculptor, studying fine art at the University of British Columbia, where she learned to think about proportion, material, and how people move through a space. A master’s in interior design from Pratt Institute followed, and then years inside some of the profession’s most demanding rooms — at Champalimaud Design in New York, on luxury hotels and residences that ranged from a Four Seasons in Jakarta to private homes in Washington, DC.
She founded Mudan to bring that same rigor to something more personal. Nearly two decades in as a residential interior designer, she has designed custom homes, whole-home renovations, kitchens, baths, and full-home furnishings, and knows how to work alongside the architects, builders, and craftsmen a project depends on — catching the small problems on paper before they become expensive ones on site.
Becoming a wife and mother sharpened all of it. Running a household with two young children taught her how much a home’s success rests on ordinary things — the flow of a busy morning, where the backpacks land, whether the mudroom actually holds what a family carries in and out.
Mudan is, by design, a boutique interior design firm — a deliberate choice, not a limitation. When you work with Mudan, you work directly with Esther: the person in your home, at your site visits, and on the other end of your emails from beginning to end. Nothing is handed to a junior designer, and the design stays coherent because one person holds the whole vision.
She respects your budget and your priorities, keeps the countless moving parts organized, and makes a genuinely complex process feel manageable. That continuity is what a high-end interior design firm should actually feel like.
“From start to finish, she listened to what we were trying to do… she helped us identify our own aesthetic more than imposing her own.”