PROFILE: Heidi Sherratt Bogart

A vision of her own

By Dawne Belloise

Heidi Sherratt was a Piscean wild child of the salt life, playing in the surf of Oahu and running barefoot to school, living out each carefree day as only a kid in a perfect world would. It was a great life in Hawaii, and her connection there runs deep and still feels like home to her.

But when Heidi was 10, her mother moved them to the suburban Bay Area of California to care for her grandmother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Heidi wasn’t thrilled, an understatement to be sure, and to make any sort of adjustment even more difficult, the kids there thought she was a bit weird because she was from Hawaii. Eventually, she made some friends and settled into life on the West Coast, although she lamented that it never felt like home, which is why Heidi decided to enroll at CU Boulder when she graduated from high school in 1987.

Growing up in Hawaii was an active outdoor lifestyle, natural and athletic, so the suburban lifestyle in California wasn’t Heidi’s style at all. Living in Boulder was more like her island life but without the ocean. She had fallen in love with skiing the mountains of Tahoe, so Boulder was a good compromise.

As a journalism major, Heidi spent a semester at sea, floating around the world from Vancouver to Japan to Hong Kong, around India, Russia, the Eastern Block, to Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco. She was already a seasoned traveler since her mom loved to wander the world and took her traveling often. As far back as Heidi can remember, the mother-daughter duo traveled. They still travel together at least once a year.

Heidi continued to travel into her twenties and it influenced her ambition to become a traveling documentary reporter. When she graduated from CU in 1991, she landed a job with CNN as a production assistant in their Atlanta studios. She was miserable.

“I couldn’t stand living in Atlanta. I had interned for CNN in Los Angeles when I was in college so I had that connection for work. I can be happy pretty much anywhere but I was miserable living in the city. I needed nature and I didn’t meet people I could identify with there. It was awful; at every level, it was not my place,” she realized, and bolted after two years.

Having a couple of friends who lived in Colorado, one in Steamboat Springs, the other in Crested Butte, she opted to escape to Steamboat. But even that town felt too big to Heidi as she was looking for a small, quaint ski town that was off the map. When she visited one of her besties in Crested Butte, Peggy Preston, Heidi fell in love with the town, packed up and moved here in 1994.

Of course she worked the various restaurant jobs, but then bought the Bacchanale with Pete Nichols and Terry Camp. They were all in their early twenties with energy and innovation. She was a partner until 2000, when she decided it wasn’t what she really wanted to do and sold her share. Simultaneously, she and Peggy were building a townhouse duplex in town. Building her own house was the impetus that initially got her excited about interior design. Heidi decided then and there to return to school to study the art and earned her associate degree in interior design in 2002.

Heidi recalls that, at the time, there were only a couple people doing interior design in Crested Butte and she felt that it was an opportune moment to open shop. Interior Visions would cover interior design and also sell retail home appointments like lighting, cabinetry, and decorative items. Heidi’s first shop was at the Four-way in 2004, but only two years later she purchased the small historic house on Elk Avenue, where Interior Vision now resides. She smiles, “I finally found what I loved doing. This is a nice combination of socializing with people and being creative. It filled exactly what I was looking for as a career in this valley.”

One night in 1999, while out on the town and dancing to a band at the Idle Spur, Heidi was introduced to a handsome Buttian named Scott Bogart. The two started hanging out but weren’t very serious at first, because, she laughs, they were both young and having too much fun. But there was something about him that stayed with her and finally, after a couple of years, they had that talk and became a couple. They’ve been together ever since, even getting hitched in 2006.

Heidi claims she has the best kid in the world, their son, Brewer, who came along in 2007. She and Scott bought a ranch up Ohio Creek, just north of Gunnison, in 2005, because, Heidi says, “I’m a horse freak. I grew up riding and that was my most favorite thing in the world to do. When I went to college I didn’t ride anymore so I was able to get back into horses here. I wanted my horses in my backyard and I love the Gunnison community.”

Being an equestrian might have had a smidge to do with a position as executive director of Tough Enough To Wear Pink (TETW), the breast cancer awareness and fundraising nonprofit organization associated with Cattlemen’s Days Rodeo. Heidi volunteered for the organization because her friend, the late and beloved Jimmy Clark, was one of the guys who helped start TETWP in Gunnison by bringing it to Cattlemen’s Days in 2005. He was tragically killed that year in a freak rodeo accident and his son, CJ, took over the organization.

“CJ is married to my best friend, Megan, so I got involved from there,” Heidi explains. “But both my grandmother and my mom had breast cancer, so I had a passion for the cause and I was happy to volunteer for it. I was already on the board of directors for the Crested Butte Center for the Arts [CBCA]. When a part-time development director position became available with the CBCA, and since we were in a recession and the interior design business was awful after the crash of 2008, I got hired for the job in 2012.”

She stayed on for two years and as her design business picked up and she became very busy, she resigned. It was shortly afterwards that CJ and Dean Dillon decided they needed to hire an executive director for TETWP because it was growing exponentially and had become far more successful than they could have imagined in such a short time.

“Dean started bringing in big-name songwriters and there was always a big community passion behind the cause and organization. It was, at the time, 100 percent volunteer but it was getting bigger and they needed to figure out a solid plan and how to use the money in the community and that was beyond what a volunteer could do,” Heidi says.

Heidi tried to say no to their proposal to hire her, because she was too busy, but at the end of the day she couldn’t turn away from the opportunity to help with a cause she was impassioned about. For the past two years, Heidi’s been basically organizing TETWP and she notes the accomplishments of the group as a whole. For her, it’s more than a job.

“It’s an honor to do it. I’m good at time management and I don’t sleep,” she laughs. “That’s how I do it. I’m not comfortable coming home from work and laying on the couch. If I’m excited about something, I’ll find the time to do it. And that’s why I do TETWP. It’s a nice balance for me, doing both interior design and TETWP. I can again have my creativity but I also can be giving back to the community and I feel like I’m a part of something that’s going to carry on for years and make such a difference in our community, something I can be proud of forever. We’re helping at the personal level for that person who just got diagnosed, to helping the hospital with essential pieces of equipment for detection and treatment, and we’re working on community education through our Wellness Series.”

Free time comes and goes in waves for Heidi. “I ride horses, and that feeds my soul; any free time I’m on my horse. In the winters I ski and play hockey, another one of my favorite things. I’m glad I did what I did in my twenties. I got to travel the world, establish my career and then I got to be a wife and a mom… I don’t feel I missed out on anything. I’m happy with my day-to-day life here in what I’m doing. I’ll get to travel again when my son goes to college. My mom still takes us on trips and we’re going to Africa on safari next year but mostly, we get to go back to Hawaii and Brewer is completely in love with the island. Hopefully he’ll go to college there and I’ll have a reason to have to be there half of the time,” she laughs slyly.

“If I could have the mountains and the ocean in my life, that would be my heaven, but I can’t imagine raising my child someplace else or living anywhere else at this point in my life. The community, the people, the history I have here, at both ends of the valley, it’s so special and I feel so lucky to live the life I live. I truly think both communities are amazing in totally different ways and I feel like moving to Gunnison is going to help keep me in this valley because Gunnison has opened up a whole new world for me. I’ve gotten involved with the ranching community and although I ride English, I’m learning team roping now, and that has opened up a different community in horse people. I love my Crested Butte friends, my clients, and the broad diversity of the people I interact with. Some of my closest friends are part of very different worlds in the same valley. That’s what keeps me here. I’ll never ever be bored in this place because there are always new places to explore and people to meet.”