About Haven
Haven: Meet Veronica
Moving to a new country is one of life's biggest leaps. At Haven, we make sure you don't have to take it alone. We are a boutique expat concierge for families on the move. For people brave enough to pack up one life and build another. Whether you're arriving in Australia or leaving it behind, we handle the details that no app can tell you: schools, suburbs, routines, and the quiet emotional work of starting over, until your new city starts to feel like home.
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Haven was born from a life lived across six countries: the US, the UK, Singapore, the UAE, China and Australia. With it brought nine international moves and four of them with young children. This journey wasn't planned as a career, it was just my life. But the lessons accumulated across those years like the hard ones, the lonely ones, and the unexpectedly joyful ones, turned out to be exactly the kind of knowledge that is meant to be shared.
Here is what those moves taught me. The hardest relocation is not always the most obvious one. Moving to the United States felt like it should have been easy: the same language and same cultural shorthand. But it was one of the most disorienting experiences of my life. Moving to Singapore, to the UAE, to China, places that looked and felt entirely different somehow felt easier. This was because I already knew that discomfort was part of the process. I went in with open eyes and an open mind.. and I knew I had to meet the people who had already learned the lessons the hard way.
Those beautiful people made all the difference. The woman in Abu Dhabi with the perfect highlights who pointed me to the right hairdresser. The parent at the school gate who knew which paediatrician to call. The expat who had already found the one restaurant in Beijing where you could get a proper taste of home on a hard day. Settling in is not about the big bureaucratic milestones. It is about building the small, invisible architecture of a life. Your supermarket, your yoga studio, finding your kids' new favourite cookies and the radio station you didn't know you'd miss until it was gone. Finding those touchstones is how a foreign city starts to feel like yours.
I know all this from experience, not theory.
I moved four times with children, from toddlers to teenagers, and in every single country, finding the right daycare or school was the cornerstone of our lives. It is where you can make your first friends, find your way into the community and begin to really belong.
Then there is the move that surprises people most of all : the one home. Repatriation carries its own particular disorientation. You return expecting familiarity and instead find that the city has moved on, your friends have built lives around your absence, and you yourself are no longer quite the person who left. Haven understands this, too. Coming home can be just as isolating as arriving somewhere new, and just as deserving of support.
And to the woman reading this at midnight, quietly holding the weight of a move that everyone else seems excited about, I see you. I have been you. I have also been the one who took too long to find her footing in a country that was perfectly good, full of opportunity and kind people, and still couldn't see it clearly. What I know now is this: happiness on an expat posting is a decision. You can make it your north star, the thing everything else is in service of, even on the days that are hard and lonely and sad. Especially on those days. With Haven, I'm hoping to show you that both the journey and the destination can bring joy. Haven is here to help you get there a little faster.
Haven isn't based on an algorithm, it's an amalgamation of a life's work I didn't even know I was doing. It was just my life. But the lessons have been vast, and the people who have helped me along the way were generous beyond measure. Now it is time to pay that forward.
I can’t wait to meet you, wherever you are. x Veronica
WHERE HAVEN HAS LIVED
Insider knowledge of the corridors you're moving through.
Australia
United Kingdom
United States
Singapore
United Arab Emirates
China