Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathali Barlas.
Hi Nathali, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My story starts in Europe. I grew up there, and so did my partner Cengiz. After years of building careers in tech, we made the leap to America — and over the next three decades, we lived and worked across the country, collecting experiences, design ideas, and a deep appreciation for what makes a place feel truly special.
The Texas Hill Country found us the way the best things often do — unexpectedly, and completely. Something about Wimberley just stayed with us. The rolling hills, the cypress-lined creeks, the unhurried pace of life. We kept coming back, until eventually we stopped leaving.
The Lazy Lavender grew out of a simple but stubborn belief: that a vacation rental should feel nothing like a vacation rental. No matching bedspreads, no builder-grade everything, no sense that a hundred other properties look exactly the same. We wanted each space to have a soul. Three of our five properties we designed ourselves — no architect, just our own instincts, our European sensibility, and a lot of trust in the process.
Today The Lazy Lavender is a collection of five properties — The Treehouse, The Pink House, The Artsy Cabin, The Farmhouse, and The Designers Cottage — each completely one of a kind. We’ve been lucky enough to earn a 4.96 rating across hundreds of Airbnb reviews, and to be recognized by press we’re genuinely proud of. But the part that never gets old is hearing from a guest that their stay became a memory they’ll carry for years. That’s still the whole point.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth? Not exactly. And I think anyone who tells you their entrepreneurial journey was smooth is either very lucky or not being fully honest.
The early challenges were the ones you expect — learning the rhythms of hospitality, figuring out pricing, understanding what guests actually want versus what you think they want. We were building this from scratch, designing spaces ourselves, making plenty of expensive mistakes along the way. But those felt like good problems. Creative problems.
What’s harder to prepare for is watching the landscape change around you. The Texas Hill Country has exploded in popularity, and with that has come a wave of large, investor-backed operations dropping forty identical cabins on a piece of land and calling it a boutique experience. They have marketing budgets we can’t touch, economies of scale we can’t match, and a product that looks impressive in a thumbnail. For a small, family-run business built on genuine individuality, that kind of competition is real. It changes the conversation you have to have with potential guests — because now you have to work harder to explain why different actually matters.
And then there are the things nobody warns you about. A guest dispute that spirals into something much uglier than it should. A flooding incident in the middle of peak season. The relentless behind-the-scenes work — the SEO, the social media, the pricing strategy, the vendor relationships — that guests never see but that keeps everything running.
What keeps us going is the part that the big operators can’t replicate: the fact that we genuinely care. Every one of our five properties has a personality, a story, a design choice that came from us. When something goes wrong for a guest, it matters to us personally — not because of a review score, but because this is our name on the door. That kind of ownership can’t be scaled to forty cabins.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about The Lazy Lavender?
The Lazy Lavender is a collection of five luxury vacation rental properties in Wimberley, Texas — but that description barely scratches the surface of what we’ve built.
Each property has its own identity. The Treehouse puts you in the forest canopy. The Pink House is bold, feminine, and unapologetically joyful. The Artsy Cabin is exactly what it sounds like — a space filled with original art and creative energy. The Farmhouse offers that wide-open Texas Hill Country feeling, and The Designers Cottage is the one where you can feel every intentional decision we made in every corner of the space. No two properties share a design language. That’s not an accident — it’s the whole philosophy.
What we’re known for is quality that shows up in the details. A 4.96 rating across more than 650 Airbnb reviews doesn’t happen by chance. It happens because we obsess over the things guests feel but don’t always notice — the quality of the linens, the way a space is lit at night, whether the outdoor shower actually feels like an experience rather than an afterthought. We think like designers and hosts at the same time, and that combination is rarer than it should be.
We also specialize in romance and special occasions. Wimberley draws couples celebrating anniversaries, proposals, honeymoons, and milestone birthdays, and we’ve built our properties and our packages around that. In fact, we recently launched what we believe is the only dedicated Proposal Package in the Texas Hill Country — a curated experience for guests who want the moment to be as memorable as the place. That’s the kind of niche thinking that sets us apart from operators running volume plays.
What I’m most proud of, brand-wise, is that The Lazy Lavender has a point of view. You know it when you see it. There’s a warmth, a European sensibility, a refusal to be generic that runs through everything we do — from the way the properties look to the way we communicate with guests. In an industry that keeps moving toward sameness, we keep moving in the opposite direction.
And increasingly, we’re not just offering a place to stay — we’re curating the full experience around it. Local wine tours, in-property charcuterie, guided experiences in and around Wimberley. We want guests to leave not just rested but genuinely enriched by the time they spent in the Hill Country.
That’s what The Lazy Lavender is. A small, family-run business with big design ambitions and an even bigger commitment to making every guest feel genuinely, personally cared for.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
No business like this gets built alone, and I’d be doing a disservice to the people behind The Lazy Lavender if I didn’t name them.
First and most importantly, my husband and partner Cengiz. He is the other half of everything we’ve created — not in a silent-partner way, but in the truest sense. We dreamed this up together, argued through the design decisions together, weathered the hard seasons together. His taste, his calm, and his willingness to take on the unglamorous work that never makes it to Instagram has been foundational to what The Lazy Lavender has become. I couldn’t have built this with anyone else, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.
Then there’s Nick Chappell, our builder. Anyone who has ever tried to bring a creative vision to life through construction knows that the relationship between owner and builder can make or break a project. Nick has been exceptional — not just technically skilled, but genuinely invested in getting it right. When you’re designing spaces without an architect, trusting your own instincts and vision, you need a builder who understands what you’re trying to achieve and cares enough to fight for it. Nick is that person. Several of our most beloved design details exist because of his craftsmanship and his willingness to go the extra mile.
And then there are our guests — particularly the ones who keep coming back. In an industry where a single bad review can rattle you, there is nothing more grounding than a guest who has stayed four, five, six times and keeps choosing you. They’re not just customers; they’ve become part of the story of this place. Their loyalty tells us that what we’re building is real, that the details matter, that the philosophy holds up. Every time a returning guest books again, it feels like a quiet vote of confidence that keeps us going.
To all of them — thank you. The Lazy Lavender is ours, but it belongs to all of you too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thelazylavender.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelazylavender/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LazyLavenderVacations/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelazylavenderwimberley
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_lazy_lavender
