Meet the “French Cowboys” Buying Up Hill Country Hotels (2024)

Four years ago, two young entrepreneurs from France began scouring the Texas Hill Country, looking to buy land and hotels for a new venture. A few months into their search, business partners Franklin Dusserre and Dylan Petrich had talked to dozens of real estate agents and toured more than 120 properties in Blanco, Johnson City, Wimberley, and other small towns with growing tourist presences. Word was getting out that a couple of guys definitely not from Texas were in the market. “They were a bit confused by us,” Petrich says. “We didn’t dress like we were from Texas. We didn’t have boots yet. And we spoke French.”

During a tour of a ranch on the Pedernales River near Johnson City,a broker—a Texan wearing Wranglers and boots, with a knife clipped to his belt—gave them a knowing glance. “He looks at us and says, ‘Wait, I’ve heard about you. Y’all are those Italian cowboys trying to buy a hotel,’ ” Petrich says, chuckling at the memory while sipping a glass of wine at the Meyer Hotel, in Comfort, one of the six hotels he’s since purchased. “I looked at him and said, ‘Well, we’re not Italian, but we are French cowboys. And we are looking for a hotel.’ ”

The name stuck. Today the Austin-based French Cowboys wear boots of their own (Tecovas for Petrich; French Chelsea boots by Aigle for Dusserre), and they’ve adopted some of the swagger for which Texans are known. With $35 million in backing from investors, they’ve snapped up six eclectic and old-timey hotels in Central Texas. They also manage a stable of almost one hundred vacation homes in the same area. And they say their goal is to become the most respected operator of boutique hotels in Texas. That may be a tall order, but the Cowboys say Texas is the perfect place to give it a go.

Dusserre, 29, and Petrich, 30, both grew up in Paris—the one across the pond, not the one in northeast Texas—with French fathers and American mothers. They’re both dual U.S. and French citizens and met while attending the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating (Petrich in 2015 and Dusserre in 2017), they stayed in touch and traveled together regularly.Eventually Petrich landed in Austin, working for a company that leased apartments and turned them into hotel suites. Dusserre, who’d been working in London for WeWork, the famous provider of coworking spaces, came for a visit that included a dip in a swimming hole in Wimberley and barbecue at the Salt Lick.

“I was expecting Texas to be flat and barren. I remember thinking, ‘This place is so much nicer than I expected.’ There are hills and rivers and lakes,” Dusserre says. “On day three I was ready to move to Austin.”

He did just that in July 2020, and they started looking for property to buy a few months later. In March 2021 he and Petrich incorporated Wilder Ways, a hotel-management company. (They later added the vacation-rental business, which they call French Cowboys Management.) Hospitality investors in Texas, they thought, were too heavily focused on urban hotels and vacation rentals. While living in Paris, Petrich would often take a train to Normandy to spend a few days at the beach, pick apples, or ride horses. He wanted to create similar rural escapes for Texans. “Not much was being invested in the periphery, the drive-to destinations in Texas,” Petrich says. “That’s something it felt like Texas was missing. Texas has the raw beauty, but the infrastructure was not built in a way that took advantage of that.”

That Texans are unaware of the charms of Hill Country towns may be debatable, but Dusserre and Petrich dove in, banking on the concept that residents of Austin and San Antonio in particular wanted to stay at hip properties with some cool histories behind them that were located not far from home. They began to discover an array of mom-and-pop hotels that had been passed from one generation to the next but rarely updated, modernized, or effectively marketed.

In February 2021 they bought their first property, the Mountain View Lodge, on five acres in Wimberley, known for its cypress-lined river and downtown shops and restaurants. They made basic improvements to the hilltop hotel, retiling showers and installing terrazzo vanities, plus adding colorful rugs and cow skulls. They renamed the hotel the Bygone and began promoting the hilltop destination, which has a gleaming oval swimming pool and a nature trail featuring a dinosaur track. Rates now start at about $150 per night. “We were the front desk, maintenance, housekeeping, and accounting,” Petrich says. “We would split our time. One of us would stay there, and we drove back and forth [between Austin and Wimberley] for a year until we built a team and understood what it took to run a hotel.”

They quickly learned that housekeeping is hard work—and it’s the backbone of the hospitality industry. “If you clean a room in the dead of summer, you’ll have a whole new appreciation for it,” Petrich says.

They next set their sights on Gruene, a quaint German Texan town with a popular old dance hall and general store. Dusserre and Petrich purchased the Gruene River Inn (soon to be the Moon Wrangler) in 2022. They’re renovating the fourteen-room property, which sits atop a hill along the Guadalupe River, envisioning a destination with plush rooms where couples can plan a weekend escape that includes floating on the river and walking to nearby Gruene Hall. A year later, they added Gruene Outpost River Lodge (soon to be Hacienda Del Rio). The 47-room facility includes a beach volleyball court, a basketball hoop, and four hundred feet of river frontage, with rooms that can accommodate families.

They’ve since added Canyon Lake Cabins & Event Center, in Canyon Lake, which has a pool, an outdoor gazebo, and access to the nearby lake, and vacation rentals in Dripping Springs and along the Llano River. In the first year, Dusserre and Petrich say, revenue at some of the under-the-radar lodges increased by 50 percent.

Last November they expanded into Comfort, another quaint Hill Country town, about fifty miles northwest of San Antonio. The pair admired its well-preserved downtown, which is dotted with historic buildings dating to 1854. They bought Camp Comfort,a group of cabins, rooms, and trailers that started its life as an athletic club and bowling alley in the 1860s, andthe Meyer Hotel, which grew from a former stagecoach stop along Cypress Creek. They purchased the town’s old post office building and 27 acres across the creek from the Meyer, too.

“Not everybody at first was open,” Petrich says. “We were two people coming into a town that does not want to become Fredericksburg. It took us a while to convince them we’re not here to turn this into the Marriott. The last thing we want to do is remove the charm.” To that end, they kept many of the Meyer’s antique furnishings, historic photos, and artworks, while upgrading bed linens, adding a small corner bar to the main lobby, and sprucing up the pool area with new recliners.

As you might expect, the French developers have gotten a mixed reception in the communities where they work. Jeanine Leeder, who owns the Ingenhuett on High, an event venue and former general store on Comfort’s High Street, describes the pair as “little millennial types with an agenda.”

“It’s not a typical Hill Country situation where people have ties to the area,” Leeder says. “They’re bringing in outside investors, and it’s a learning curve for them.” But she gives the Cowboys a bit of a hat tip, too, adding that they’ve kept the characters of the hotels they’ve acquired intact and never tried to turn them into things that didn’t fit their towns’ personalities. “They bring higher quality, which is great,” she says.

“People like to come to Comfort because it’s legitimately Texas,” Leeder says. “Comfort’s going to be ‘all that’ one day. But we don’t want to be Fredericksburg. The biggest thing to me is they aren’t making changes that will make Comfort something we don’t want it to be.”

The Cowboys are doing a good job of “keeping Comfort Comfort,” says Leeder’s daughter, Abigail Carlton, who runs the town’s Alamo Meat Market with her husband, Reed. “Whenever anyone comes into Comfort from the outside, everyone wants to know who they are and questions them,” Carlton says. “But I think it’s good to have a different perspective.”

The French Cowboys agree. “We’re different here,” Petrich says. “We talk a little differently; we dress a little differently. We have a different eye because we didn’t grow up here. Maybe some will say we’re not Texans, but imitation is the biggest form of flattery. Maybe we’re only playing cowboy, but we’re playing with true admiration for what Texas is.”