REAL CLIENT EXPERIENCES: SARA VERGARA & LORA PAVLOVA

Sara Vergara
Client of Webster&Co since 2024.

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''Marbella has always felt like a second home to me. I came here as a baby, barely old enough to know where I was, and yet somehow I knew. My parents had a house that felt like paradise every summer we visited. One day, the thought became clear as morning light: we wanted to spend the rest of our lives here. A decision we have never regretted, and one we are certain we never will.

The first home I lived in here was my family's house. We loved it so deeply that my husband and I chose to marry within its walls, to let our wedding day breathe in the same air that had shaped so much of who I was. It was there, amid the warmth of that place, that we knew we truly belonged to Marbella. And so our own story began in Guadalmina.

Our home there was something beautiful. Tucked beside the river, it was a life lived close to nature, waking to the song of nightingales, watching animals move past the window with the unhurried ease of creatures who answer to no clock. But as our children grew, so did our sense of what we needed. The townhouse, as lovely as it was, began to feel like a chapter that had gently run its course. We longed for wider spaces, for a garden, for a pool where summer afternoons could stretch out freely. Our children were approaching their teenage years, and we wanted them to bring their friends home, to fill the house with laughter, to simply be.

Growing up, I spent summers in Los Monteros and adolescence along La Milla de Oro. When we began searching for our next home, I wanted to stay close to those places, and close to my parents. And so the search led us, almost naturally, to Nueva Andalucía. I love it there; the greenery, the golf courses rolling out like quiet carpets of calm, the sense of being at the centre of everything without feeling rushed by anything. For me, Nueva Andalucía is Marbella as it always was: the aesthetics of a lifetime, an unhurried beauty that never goes out of style.

The search itself was not easy at first. We navigated it mostly through screens —lost among inflated prices and overwhelming listings— until we found Webster & Co. We had already admired many of their properties online before we finally decided to visit their offices in person. I still remember the first moment I met Lora. She was walking past the door just as I arrived, and she welcomed me with that smile of hers; wide, warm, completely genuine, as if she had all the time in the world just for you. By the time I left her office that afternoon, two viewings were already in the diary. Everything flowed from there.

The very first house we visited turned out to be a quiet sign of things to come. It belonged, as we discovered much later, to close friends of ours. My husband and I have always had quite different tastes, and finding common ground took patience. Lora became our steady point of balance, never rushing us, never pushing. There were moments of frustration, moments where we felt we were searching for a feeling we couldn't quite name. Each house held a different kind of promise for each of us, and the process stretched on, long and sometimes uncertain.

It was a challenge for us, and for Lora too. Until the day her message arrived: "This house is exactly what you're looking for."

I had to compose myself when I stepped inside. The feeling was immediate and quiet and enormous all at once, the kind of feeling you don't perform. It was the house I had always drawn in my mind: a home arranged around a courtyard, in the spirit of a classic Roman house. And there it was, in real life, with a round courtyard at its very heart.

I had kept a list, a quiet, private list of everything I had ever wanted in a home. My husband had gently warned me that finding a single place to hold it all might be asking too much. And then there it was.

Sea views. Views of La Concha. Nature. A great pine tree standing in the garden like it had always been waiting.

Working with Lora was one of the great gifts of this process. Her patience was boundless, her presence steady and warm through every twist the search took. If I were to guide anyone through something like this, I would tell them: find someone who is not only a great professional, but a genuinely good person. That is what made all the difference for us. And for that, I am deeply grateful to Webster & Co.''