Meet Katy Merlet | Yoga Teacher & Owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Katy Merlet and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Katy, how do you think about risk?
Taking risks has played a major part in both of my life. At age 24, I left a promising career to travel to Australia with $1000 to my name. I lived there for the next seven years. Meanwhile my husband,  Paul was working as a Foreign Exchange broker in London, a very stressful occupation. Luckily he had the foresight to invest in personal pensions investing in riskier but potentially more rewarding funds. In 2013, Paul left a very lucrative career to train to be a yoga teacher in Los Angeles where we first met.  I left my job in Australia to pursue the same dream. After training Paul went back to the UK and I went back to Australia, by chance, eighteen months later we met again at a mutual friends studio in Massachusetts. From there we decided to travel the world together teaching yoga, which we did for the next four years, visiting Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, India, Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, France, Italy, Greece, Israel, Jordan and Spain.  In November 2017, We travelled across the border to the UK territory of Gibraltar to get married. We decided to settle in Texas to be close to my family. We used all their investments to purchase land and start to develop The Shire.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
We have created a unique wedding and event venue surrounded by nature set in the Sam Houston National Forest just outside Huntsville. We imported three giant Tipis from Sweden, which interlink, making a beautiful open space for our guests. We had to develop raw woodland to get the venue to where it is today and there were many challenges along the way to accomplish this. We have learned that you can’t expect everything to happen at once or to turn out exactly as you envisioned, getting things done one step at a time, being patient to achieve our dream. We have great ambitions for further development At The Shire, we want to build a yoga studio and accommodations’, but we have had to let things happen organically. In the meantime, we are teaching yoga classes in the teepees and planning our next project in which we build our yoga studio and tiny homes out of the cob method building.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Local Foods, Pinks Pizza, Pappasitos downtown, Kings Bierhaus, St. Arnolds Brewery, Flower Child, Shopping in the Galleria, House of Blues for live music, The heights thrift shopping, Buffalo exchange in Montrose, The Museum of Fine Arts, Astros game at Minute Maid, Walking the Rice University Campus and the Houston Zoo.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Teri Almquist Wellness Hot Yoga Merrimack Valley, MA Matt Bell-Roberts JuiceFast HTX

Website: www.attheshire.com
Instagram: @attheshire
Facebook: @attheshire
Yelp: At The Shire

Image Credits
Emily Danielle Jones Photography