At Home With Debbie Phelps - Baltimore Magazine

Debbie Phelps almost always buys things in threes. That’s fitting: Her three children, including her youngest—swimming phenom Michael Phelps—are grown and living on their own, but never far from Phelps’s heart or mind.

“I carried those back from Fukuoka,” says 63-year-old Phelps, motioning to three parasols mounted against a charcoal wallpapered wall in the foyer of her harbor-front Ritz-Carlton Residences condominium in Federal Hill. The trip—to the 2001 swimming world championships in Fukuoka, Japan—had been one of her first international forays, and she’d brought home not only the parasols, but also a triumphant 16-year-old Michael, who’d broken his own world record for a gold medal win in the 200-meter butterfly.

It’s fitting, too, that those parasols are the first things greeting visitors when the private elevator doors open to Phelps’s second-floor residence. The foyer—warm, lush, and punctuated with this subtle memento—sets the tone for the whole home.

“When I walk in, I want my home to almost open its arms and wrap me up in them,” says Phelps, who moved in 2013 to her current unit from a larger space in the same development, keeping much of the same design. “I want it to be comfortable. I want it to be home.”

But in creating the space, Phelps had another goal in mind, this one tied to her family’s remarkable journey. “I want my home to tell the story,” says Phelps, sitting just steps from the foyer in a home office lined with images of the cities that played a starring role in her son’s rise to fame, including Sydney, Athens, Barcelona, and London. Around her, and scattered throughout the home, are keepsakes collected as she traveled to competitions across the globe. “It’s like opening a window to where things have been,” she says.

Though the journey began in Western Maryland, where she grew up—and where she met ex-husband Fred Phelps—the past 15 years, in particular, have been a truly instructional affair. The run-up to those years had moved the family from Harford County, where Debbie Phelps was a public-school teacher in home economics, to Baltimore County, so that eldest daughter Hilary could pursue a swimming career with the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Phelps’s middle child, Whitney, and youngest, Michael, soon followed in their sister’s footsteps, plunging Debbie Phelps into the hectic life of a swim mom. Both daughters proved to be accomplished swimmers, but it was Michael who captured the world’s attention with his athletic feats, competing in the 2000 Sydney Olympics at age 15, nabbing six gold medals at the Athens Olympics in 2004, a record eight gold medals in Beijing in 2008, and then another another four in London in 2012—all contributing to his unprecedented total of 22 Olympic medals.