This Architect Makes Her Dream Castles Come True

There is no room for mistakes in her work as an architect, but Leslie LeBon says that’s not true when she builds sandcastles.

“If the castle falls down, I can just build another one,” said the Lake Forest woman, who is a five-year veteran of sand sculpture.

Although she classifies her sand building as a hobby, there are times when she takes it seriously indeed--such as when she is competing. Last year, she and nine other architects on a team won a best overall in the sandcastle-building contest sponsored by the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The team’s winning free-form creation, called “Castle of the Gods,” resembled a frosty ice cream cone, LeBon said.

Sweeter yet, one of the teams her group beat had her architect husband, Gregory LeBon, a 10-year sand-sculpting veteran, as a member. Her husband’s team had won the previous year.

The architects’ sandcastle contest will be Sept. 29 this year, on the main beach in Corona del Mar.

But the LeBons won’t be waiting till then to build another castle. On July 28, she and her husband will join eight other architects to compete in the U.S. Sand Castle Open sponsored by Imperial Beach in San Diego County. The first-place winner will receive $5,000.

“We’re just a group of architects who go to play in the sand,” she said. “We work and work--and then we build sandcastles.”

Of course, people of many other professions have taken up sand sculpture as a hobby, she said, but “not very many women are involved.” But for herself, she said, “I really have connected with sand sculpture.”

Besides offering her the opportunity to master another medium, the hobby offers “a release from my work,” she said.

The way people get involved with the hobby, she said, is to take part in beach sand contests. “People who stick with it evolve into good sculptors,” although architects clearly have an advantage when it comes to working in three dimensions, she says.

“And you definitely have to practice.”

Over the past two years, the LeBons have traveled on expense-paid trips to Kamaishi, Japan, where they have built a 25-foot-high and 100-foot-long futuristic castle and a medieval-style castle. Those edifices were part of a campaign to promote tourism to that city.

“It took 10 of us and a lot of Japanese volunteers to make the sculptures,” she said. “I was the only woman.”

Oddly, Leslie LeBon, a UC Berkeley graduate who works for Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo in Newport Beach, had never made a sand sculpture before she met her husband-to-be--”I just hung out at the beach and got a tan”--but that played a part in their getting together.

“On our first date, he showed me how to carve stairs in the sand,” she said. “It was a cloudy, rainy and romantic day in Laguna Beach.”