Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole.
Hi Nicole , please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I began my professional career out of undergrad at what is now Aspen Words, working in marketing and PR. I’ve always loved the power of story and the written word as a form of creative expression — so it felt like a natural home. After about five years there I made a leap, left Aspen, and landed at an advertising agency in San Francisco called Eleven Inc.
I was quickly folded into the new business team, coordinating creative pitches — sometimes as many as one every two weeks. The agency was in an ambitious period of growth, and that role gave me exposure to every department: copywriting, SEO, digital, print, radio, television. It’s where I learned the fundamentals of communication, client intake, and what it means to truly listen and translate a brief into a successful creative output.
But the more time I spent there, the more I realized that while I loved the strategy, I wanted to be closer to the making. I wanted to see something built.
At the same time, my mother Noelle’s interior design business was taking off in Aspen. What had started as a side project was growing quickly, and I stepped in to help her brand the company and build her website. I never expected that to lead me into design — but the more I witnessed her work, the more intrigued I became.
She was extraordinarily meticulous about details that are easy to overlook — how a door swings, where a light switch lands, the small decisions that quietly determine how easy or difficult it is to live in a space. What I fell completely in love with was the moment a client experienced one of those functional design decisions for the first time — the realization that their home now supported their life in a way it hadn’t before. That, combined with the opportunity to create interiors that told each client’s own narrative, made the decision clear.
In 2013 I returned to school for interior design in Denver, began working under my mother, and never looked back.
On founding Materie Home:
After more than a decade in the industry, a particular obsession started to take up permanent residence in my mind — one I couldn’t quiet no matter how many projects I completed. It was the hunt. The search for the object that stops someone in a room before they know why.
For years, sourcing those pieces for clients was the hardest part of the job — and also the most alive I felt doing it. The things that made an interior feel genuinely considered were never the easiest to find. They came from small workshops. Limited runs. Makers who designed with a specificity that mass manufacturing simply cannot replicate. I was traveling to find them, building relationships with the people behind them, and falling deeper in love with the objects themselves.
Materie was founded in 2023 because the place I was always looking for didn’t exist. Not as a retail concept, but as a solution to a problem I kept encountering — for myself and for every client I worked with who deserved better than what was readily available.
Every piece in the collection is chosen the way I chose for clients — slowly, with real criteria, after visiting the maker and understanding the process. The question I ask of everything is simple: would this still feel right in ten years? Nothing enters the collection until the answer is unequivocally yes.
Materie is the place I always wished existed. I finally decided to build it.
Today I find myself genuinely energized by both businesses — and by the very different challenges each one presents.
On the interior design side, the landscape is shifting in fascinating ways. AI tools are changing how we visualize and communicate design, while at the same time there’s a powerful cultural movement back toward the handmade — toward furniture and objects that carry the evidence of human hands. Those two forces feel contradictory on the surface, but I think they’re actually connected. The more automated the world becomes, the more people hunger for something real.
Matter remains a small family business of three partners, and that’s entirely by design. We’ve worked hard to carve a genuine niche in high-end residential design, and the right clients keep finding us. I’m deeply proud of that. It means the work is speaking for itself.
With Materie, the challenge is a different kind of discipline — navigating the realities of e-commerce while staying fiercely true to the intention behind it. Representing artists and makers at the highest level of craftsmanship means resisting every shortcut. It would be easy to scale by compromising. We have no interest in that.
What I love most is that both businesses keep teaching me something the other one can’t. I’m still learning, and I hope that never changes.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Honest answer? No. And I’ve come to believe that a smooth road probably means you’re not taking enough risks.
Building Matter with my family from the ground up in a market like Aspen comes with its own particular pressures. The clients are sophisticated, the projects are complex, and the margin for error is thin. Early on, learning to navigate the full scope of a high-end residential project — the contractors, the architects, the budgets, the timelines, the inevitable surprises inside walls — while simultaneously developing my own design voice was humbling in the best and hardest possible way. There were projects that pushed me to be at my best.
Running a small family business adds another layer entirely. The relationships that make a partnership beautiful are the same ones you have to protect when the pressure is high and the decisions are hard. We’ve had to learn how to separate the personal from the professional — and how to come back together when those lines blur.
Launching Materie introduced a completely different set of challenges. E-commerce, logistics, importing, customer service, brand building, representing makers whose work deserves to be seen by the right people — it’s an entirely different muscle. There were moments I questioned whether I was spreading myself too thin.
But the struggles are also where the clarity comes from. Every hard season taught me something about what I actually valued — in the work, in the people I work with, and in the kind of business I wanted to build.
We’ve been impressed with Matter Planning & Design, LLC / Materie, LLC , but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
On Matter Interiors:
Matter is a boutique luxury interior design studio based in Aspen, Colorado. We specialize in high-end residential design — new construction, full renovations, and the kind of projects where every decision matters and nothing is left to chance. We work primarily in the Aspen and Snowmass area, a market that demands an exceptionally high level of craft, coordination, and creative conviction.
What sets us apart begins with how we’re structured. Matter is a small family business of three partners, and we are intentionally boutique. Every client we take on receives our full attention. That high-touch, collaborative approach is something we protect fiercely.
We operate at the intersection of interior design and project management. We speak the language of contractors, architects, and builders as fluently as we speak the language of materials and aesthetics. That construction fluency means our clients never have to translate between their design vision and the people building it.
What I’m most proud of, brand-wise, is our reputation. In a market like Aspen, where word of mouth is everything, the right clients keep finding us. We haven’t built that through advertising. We’ve built it through the work.
Our design philosophy is rooted in restraint, materiality, and deep listening. We believe a home should reflect how a life is actually lived — not a trend, not a mood board, but the specific, irreplaceable character of the people who inhabit it. We design homes that are meant to be passed down, and for dynamic and evolving lifestyles.
On Materie Home:
Materiehome.com is a curated luxury home goods source founded in Aspen — born directly out of my work as an interior designer. For over a decade I sourced exceptional objects for clients building high-end homes. The pieces that made those interiors feel genuinely considered — the ones that stopped people in a room — were always the hardest to find. Made in small workshops. Produced in limited quantities. Designed with a specificity that mass manufacturing cannot replicate.
Every piece in the collection is chosen slowly, with real criteria, after visiting the maker and understanding the process. We represent artists and craftspeople working at the highest level — from ceramic artists in Italy to furniture makers in Gotland, Sweden.
What sets Materie apart is the integrity of the curation. This is not a marketplace. It is a deeply considered edit, created after spending my career understanding what makes an object earn its place in a home. Every maker in the collection has been visited, understood, and chosen for reasons that go beyond aesthetics — the process, the material honesty, the commitment to craft.
What I want readers to know is that Materie exists for people who care about what they bring into their homes — who understand that the objects around us shape how we feel, how we live, and who we become. We source so you don’t have to settle.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
For design specifically, I spend a lot of time with Apartamento and Cabana — magazines that capture interiors the way I actually want to live in them. Unpretentious, deeply personal, full of objects with stories. And EST Living remains one of my favorite online design destinations — the curation is consistently excellent and the point of view is strong. Kelly Wearstler’s Substack, Wearstler World, is another one I return to regularly. She has a way of articulating the creative process that feels both aspirational and genuinely instructive.
For podcasts, I gravitate toward topics on leadership, intuition, intentional mindset, and the idea of manifesting possibility — which, when I think about it, is an extension of how I approach a room. Design is fundamentally an act of imagining what doesn’t yet exist and believing in it enough to build it. Jay Shetty’s On Purpose, To Be Magnetic with Lacy Phillips, and Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett are all in regular rotation. They keep expanding how I think about what’s possible and how to be in integrity — in business, in work, as a parent, and in life.
Travel is my most important resource of all. There is no substitute for standing in a room, touching a material, watching a maker work. The sourcing trips that inform both Matter and Materie — to Italy, to Scandinavia, to workshops and ateliers that don’t have Instagram accounts — are where my eye gets calibrated and my creative energy gets replenished.
And honestly — walking around my hometown. Aspen is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful places on earth. Some of my best thinking happens on a trail. The landscape is endlessly instructive. It has a lot to teach about proportion, restraint, and what happens when you remove everything unnecessary.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.matterinteriors.com / www.materiehome.com
- Instagram: @matterinteriors / @materiehome
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matterinteriors
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-hernandez-b0123b19/
