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Meet the Boyer Family Growing an Authentic Vail
PHOTO BY CAYLEE RUSH
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eet the Boyer family, Vail’s most recent returning residents, helping the town grow one home — and one family — at a time! Dr. Laura Boyer was recently recruited as Vail’s newest OBGYN. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to live in the mountains, and I feel so fortunate to be able to practice medicine in such an amazing environment. Every day when I’m seeing patients, I’ll steal a look out my window and it honestly makes me so happy to be here,” she says. “Vail is a very special place for me” Her husband Finn Boyer, owner of Alura Development, feels the same, and if you’ve been around Vail for long enough you might recognize him from his decade long tenure at the Park Meadows Lodge. “It was one of the original buildings from the 1960s and we loved it,” Finn Boyer shares. Indeed, records show that the original site of the Park Meadows Lodge was one of the first sites developed in Vail — it was the only large mountain side lot without any view obstructions. “We would have liked to just renovate the old building” he says, “but at the end of the day it was clear that if we wanted to create something that took advantage of the natural views, we were going to have to completely scrape the site and start fresh. We used it all up,” Boyer recalls knowing The Park Meadows’ glory days were through. The site
is special for Finn Boyer — he first stayed in the Park Meadows Lodge while working summers in Vail throughout high school and has been working steadily on acquiring and entitling development rights on the property for almost 20 years. After getting married, Laura Boyer developed her robotic surgical skills at high-volume hospitals, while Finn Boyer transitioned from hotelier to a stay-at-home dad with a real estate hobby. What began as a small project in Boulder eventually became Alura Development (an anagram of his wife’s name), a firm whose projects spanned from Boulder to Aspen to Tahoe and even along the California coast. It was one of those projects in California that reunited Finn Boyer with his childhood friend, Lindsay Brown who, along with his wife Rory, own the nationally acclaimed Brown Studio in Encinitas, California. “It was real serendipity that they just happened to be available right when I needed them,” Finn Boyer says. “They’re in the business of creating livable art that you instantly want to call home, the perfect juxtaposition of both soft and modern elements.” Alura
Development and Brown Studio are collaborating on Boyer’s new Vail project. In talking about his development philosophy, Finn Boyer says, “My only talent is recognizing talent — I started a software company, a clothing line and I even produced movies for a while. I was really lucky to spend my youth around so many truly talented people and my one overriding belief is that we can never create art for someone else. I’ll never be smart enough to know what other people want, so my only alternative is to take my passion for something and do something I feel is great and hope that enough people share my vision — and that is the underlying mantra that has really guided my whole professional career.” “Vail is a sacred place to me,” he adds, “and I feel that especially when you’re building a large development in a small town it’s going to have an outsized impact. Ergo, there’s a responsibility that falls on those of us who build to build things that are beautiful and timeless.” In that vein, Alura Development has also retained local architect Pierce Austin to oversee the project on site. Finn Boyer believes that the best architecture always has a little sprezzatura sprinkled in, and that is exactly what his international design team has delivered. The new development boasts 10 homes that range from 4,600 feet to 6,200 feet with oversized three-car garages and individual rooftop hot tubs with wide spans of folding glass doors that open onto massive outdoor living spaces for a true indoor/outdoor living experience. The homes authentically encompass all that Vail has to offer — wonder, beauty and community. • You can visit Dr. Laura Boyer at Colorado Mountain Medical offices in Vail or Avon and follow along with Vail’s newest development on Instagram @aluravail.
