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“I
am competitive. I like to play hard and work hard. That’s what
I do,” says Leigh Brecheen from the breakfast nook of her sun-dappled
kitchen in Toro Canyon, during an interview overlooking gardens and
a pasture with two grazing polo ponies. Leigh will be one of only a few
female polo players charging down the field at full speed this polo season,
side by side with the men, at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club.
“I’ve always been drawn to Santa Barbara and obviously polo was a
big attraction too, but when I first came up here, I felt an instant sense
of, ‘I’m home’,” explains Leigh, adding that in 2000, “we were looking for
a house and I said, ‘I want something horsey.’ We came up here and saw
this empty land which was the last thing we should have bought, and so
we bought it… I am very into the green movement and I was trying to
figure out how to build something really green.” Leigh explains how in the
process of deciding what type of house to build, the property next door
was developed. A polo field was put in and they were planning to build
a large house. The County required the existing house to be demolished.
“One day I was over there in the house and said, ‘Our property line is
thirty feet from here; what if we just acquired this house that is going to
be demolished and moved it?’ And so to make a very long story short,
we did. The County has an Innovative Building Review Program and
they really got behind it and were excited at the thought of a house being
recycled. The Board of Architectural Review and the IBRP people were
fantastic, everybody jumped on board to try to make it happen, and it
happened very fast. So they cut it in two and moved it in 2008.” Leigh
reports, “We’ve done quite a bit of work to the house, and the really
great thing was that the people who originally built it and sold it to our
neighbor were very emotionally attached to it. It was their retirement
house and they raised their grandchildren in it and they came out and
a passion for Polo
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