Haven House

A Safe Place to Heal

Haven House is a safe, relaxing group home for women undergoing partial hospitalization or intensive outpatient trauma therapy. It was designed for health, harmony, and happiness with emphases on natural materials, art immersion, and animal companionship.

Haven House was built from an existing home, which was chosen for having a layout ideal for group living and was extensively remodeled over several years to suit these purposes, with construction completing in 2025.

Trauma-Informed Design

At Haven House, all decisions were guided by the goal of helping women recover from trauma, from the selection of raw materials to the obsessive details considered for each piece of furniture to all the features that help improve sleep quality. The results of this are everywhere you look—quite literally because care was taken to make sure a grounding object is in view from any point in the home. As a group living environment, the relationship residents have with each other here is the largest factor affecting their feelings of comfort and security, so above all else, many measures have been taken to help people get along and generally improve harmony at Haven House.

For more, see Trauma-Informed Design.

Therapeutic Artwork

Haven House is full of artistic elements designed to make residents feel better and help them overcome psychological barriers to therapy. Throughout the home, digital art displays can be easily updated to provide a constantly stimulating environment without disrupting familiarity. In common areas, works of high art have been carefully chosen and placed to communicate crucial mental health concepts, which can be all be explored when the time is right. Then there is the Journey Gallery, a collaborative creative space that gives residents a place to display their own artwork surrounded and supported by the work of dozens of local female artists in support of their healing.

For more, see Therapeutic Artwork.

Animal Support

Having a pet in the home has several benefits that help people heal from trauma, but the practical challenges that come with animals typically preclude them from being a part of trauma recovery therapy. However, Haven House has been designed to solves these problem by integrating the living needs of cats into the home in a way that allows them to be a positive part of a group living environment without causing disruption.

Haven House was built for flexibility, with five ventilated areas for litter boxes and ten different configurations for cat-safe living environments using a special gate and various combinations of bedrooms, allowing a cat to provide companionship to just one resident or the entire household.

For more, see Animal-Supportive Homes and Animal-Supportive Architecture.

Photo Gallery

Please Note: No images of the front of the home are shared here due to privacy concerns.