After many moves, Superior is now ‘Haven’ for interior designer and her family

Between her father’s and her husband’s careers, Laura Hodgson has lived in 12 states throughout her life.

Her father worked for the Federal Highway Administration, so her family moved to wherever his next assignment took them. Her husband of 17 years this month, David, was an officer on a nuclear submarine and, like most military families, the Hodgsons would go wherever the Navy told them to go.

Rather than bemoan that fact that she never stayed anywhere long enough to really consider it “home,” Laura considers how the exposure to travel, great people, diverse cultures and different architecture has made her the person and interior designer she is today. “It has really affected my perspective, career and our priorities as a family,” says the owner of Haven LLC in Superior. “I think I am a better designer because of my experiences.”

Laura, husband David and daughters Chloe, now 9, and Sophie, now 6, moved from Massachusetts to Colorado in 2004. “It was sort of by design,” Laura says. “I was actually born in Colorado.”

Laura’s parents moved from Colorado when she was a baby, and she hadn’t lived here since. She and David are both from large families now living in Kansas, Nebraska or Colorado, with Laura’s parents having made their home in Fort Collins.

“We’ve wanted to be closer to family so we could be a part of those special moments in each others’ lives,” Laura says, noting her husband was looking for a job opportunity in Colorado and eventually found one as a thin film optical engineer at Research Electro Optics in Boulder. “We’re hoping this is it, that Colorado is the last move.”

David also is an avid rock climber and the entire family is “very outdoorsy,” enjoying camping, hiking and biking, Laura says, so living in the Boulder area was a natural choice.

“The weather here is great year-round,” she says. “We ride bikes in December if there is no snow on the ground.”

It was while attending school in Virginia to obtain her psychology degree that Laura re-discovered her knack for decorating. “I have always loved interior design,” she says. “I remember growing up and decorating my rooms. It’s just something I enjoyed doing, and my mom accommodated me.”

Laura found a job as a receptionist at a commercial interior design firm when she wasn’t attending classes, and worked her way up to design assistant. After realizing how much she enjoyed the job, she eventually obtained a degree in interior design. When she moved to Massachusetts, she went to work for a high-end residential interior design firm to see the difference between residential and commercial work. She found she enjoyed residential interior design more because the results were a personal reflection of her clients and their families.

Laura is also able to apply what she has learned about psychology of color, ergonomics and workplace dynamics to her work as an interior designer. “The two blend together so well, because clients have a hard time verbalizing what they want,” Laura says. “My psychology training helps me to understand them.”

Laura was with a firm in Massachusetts when she had her first child and found that working for someone else was not the best fit for her and her family. She started Haven and had been in business for herself three years when the Hodgsons moved to Colorado. The transition with her business wasn’t too difficult, as many of her accounts were national, so it was just a matter of changing to whom she paid taxes, Laura says.

“I knew when we moved that it would take a while to build the business up again,” she says. “I had young kids and I was fine with that. It worked well with where we were at with our family in that time of our lives.”

And so is the Hodgson family, which continues to travel – including to Argentina for three weeks and completing a six-week tour of national parks (the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, Banff and Jasper) last year – and enjoys the many benefits of living in the Boulder area.

“We could have moved closer to Denver, but we enjoy Pearl Street and all the variety of experiences the community of Boulder has to offer," Laura says. "It’s a lifestyle-focused community. … It’s just a wonderful community to be in.”