Renowned Architect Creates Lasting Impact

INSPIRED BY HIS MONROE CHILDHOOD, LEE LEDBETTER’S ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS CONTINUE TO COLOR OUR WORLD.

ARTICLE BY LAURA W CLARK | PHOTOGRAPHY BY KELLY MOORE CLARK

The northeast Louisiana backdrop of Lee Ledbetter’s childhood shaped him as much as he would eventually shape the buildings and gardens featured in Architectural Digest.

  “I have forever associated beauty with nature, and I feel incredibly grateful to have grown up in a place so connected to the outdoors,” Lee said.

  In 1962, when he was four, Lee and his family moved into a newly-constructed house where he and his three siblings would spend their childhoods. Their Georgian-style home on Pargoud Boulevard, where Lee’s 88-year-old mother Helen still lives, features beautiful vistas of the outdoors, with the family room and breakfast room overlooking the courtyard. Helen and her husband Roy, who died 12 years ago, designed the home this way because she wanted a house where she “could always view the outside.”

Their home also overlooks the levee, which is 50 yards from the Ouachita River. The levee symbolized beauty and strength for young Lee. “The levee was an amazing place to spend my childhood. There’s something quite architectural about a levee, which is an earthen wall, sinewy and sculptural in its conformance to the path of the river.”

 Louisiana’s sub-tropical climate afforded Lee a variety of recreations. His father, who was a busy orthopedic surgeon, found time to build Lee a greenhouse which allowed him to pursue his passion for gardening. Lee’s younger brother Woody, with whom he shared a bedroom, remembers how important geography was to Lee. Lee constructed a “banana plantation,” a loquat winery, and with the help of his best friend and neighbor Margaret Sartor, a toad farm in their backyard. Woody was the laborer. “I had to do certain things, or I was kicked out of the toad farm. Then our interests diverged. I was saved by crickets and cane poles at 7 years old,” Woody said.
 These childhood memories remain vivid in Margaret’s mind. “Lee and I grew up in each other’s kitchens and backyards, privy to our mothers’ gossip, spying on our older siblings, and ordering our younger brothers around like ancillary staff,” she said.

 Woody, now an insurance agent in Monroe, was athletic like his oldest sibling John, now a physician and the founder of Louisiana Pain Care. Anne, now a minister in Delaware, is the second to oldest and was academically-driven like John and Lee. Woody, often exhausted from playing sports all day, said there were a lot of sleepless nights in the bedroom he shared with his brother. “I would tie a t-shirt around my head to cover my eyes,” he said, smiling, “because Lee was up all night making dang sure he was going to ace his history test.”

 Lee’s tenacity and meticulous attention to detail were evident from an early age, his mother said. As a young child, he once walked into a neighbor’s home and immediately detected the scent of the terrazzo floors. His acute senses and colorful imagination crept into his dreamlife. Helen insisted her four children eat breakfast together each day, and many of those morning meals began with Lee announcing, “I had a dream last night.” Lee would then regale his siblings and mother with vibrant details of his dreams. While Lee cannot recall those dreams now, he remembers his dreams always feeling “epic.” “My favorite aspect of this story is that they loved me enough to let me bore them, morning after morning, without stopping me,” he said.

 Lee was always asking questions, and he was extremely creative, Helen said. “My mother watched him draw when he was a little boy, and she told me he could be an architect,” she said. “Years later, his third-grade teacher called me and said, ‘I want to tell you that Lee is a very special child. Lee is not only smart, but he’s very creative, and you often don’t have the combination of both creative and smart.” 

 When Lee was in fifth grade, he began inventing his own cities. Rand McNally published oversized travel guidebooks containing maps of every state, and each state featured enlarged versions of that state’s major cities. Lee and his friend Taylor would trace the outline of the cities and then fill them in with isometric 3-D aerial views, reimagining the towns as they wished they were. Their buildings and bridges were more space age, the interstates more layered, and the terrain contained an added layer of dense, tropical vegetation that was missing from the Rand McNally versions.

 As a young boy, Lee would accompany his mother during her daily errands, sometimes two or three times per day. He would lean his head against the family’s station wagon window and watch the houses pass him in rapid succession as his mother drove through Monroe. His young mind absorbed the stark contrast of those houses, which ranged from mid-century modern to neoclassical.

 The Monroe landscape was not the only character to influence Lee’s young life. Lee was an outgoing kid with an “unending sense of humor,” Woody said, adding that these were attributes he gained from his mother. Conversely, Lee’s father was quiet and reserved, but he and Lee shared a passion for building art. Lee would spend extensive amounts of time in his father’s workshop, watching him reproduce antique furniture. Lee shared a similar interest with his paternal grandmother during family visits to Birmingham; she painted china and porcelain while Lee worked on his creations.

 Perhaps the most enduring artistic influence in Lee’s life was that of Tommie Sue, Margaret’s mother and Helen’s best friend. “Tommie Sue was a huge influence on me,” Lee said. “She was an incredibly talented painter and could achieve someone’s likeness like no other. Margaret and I often sat for her while she sketched us. I loved visiting her studio.”

 Margaret and Lee shared an admiration for art, which flourished within the walls of their childhood. Margaret’s home—and Lee’s second home—was filled with art and photography books featuring modern and historical pictures. Margaret’s father, a surgeon like Lee’s father, was an amateur photographer, and her mother, a working artist, often talked to the children about art.

 Their adventures were not limited to their homes. Lee and Margaret played in the newly-constructed house frames on Indian Mound Boulevard. They would climb the wooden posts, explore the empty spaces, and imagine what the rooms would eventually become. Their minds transformed the levee behind their homes into the yellow brick road, and they performed “leaps and lifts, pretzel-like twirls, and dramatic dips” on Margaret’s backyard tennis court. They performed the “most ridiculous skits” they could create for one another—complete with outrageous costumes and make-up—and laughed until it was difficult to breathe.

 Proximity and a tight bond fueled their friendship. “Lee and I lived in houses side by side, and that is how we shared our childhood—side by side. As children, we were bright, curious, and eager to be liked; we were the kind of kids who played by the rules, or, more accurately, we tried very hard to appear to play by the rules,” Margaret said. “I think what bound us so powerfully throughout childhood was our secret life. We were both profoundly sensitive and somewhat terrified that we did not fit into the world around us. From an early age, we shared fantasies of lives filled with magic and glamour and lives as artists.”

 Margaret and Lee’s fantasies would come to fruition. Margaret is a photographer, writer, and independent curator who teaches at Duke University. She is the author of several books, including a memoir, “Miss American Pie,” which describes her experiences as a teenager growing up in 1970s Monroe. Her memoir, like her childhood, heavily featured her best friend, Lee. “Later, as I began to write and to photograph, and Lee began to draw and design buildings, we shared the fears and anxieties of those unpredictable career paths, and, of course, we have been fortunate enough to share some significant successes. We both love our work …  I think part of what has always bound us is how we have been able to encourage and cultivate in each other our unique obsessions and active imaginations. And we each have made careers of our abilities to literally imagine, create, and construct the details of our lives.”

 Lee began his college career majoring pre-med, before deciding he had “no desire to have someone else’s life in his hands.” Even while studying medicine, he never stopped drawing, and he eventually followed his childhood passion and earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. He completed a one-year program at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and then received his master’s degree in architecture from Princeton University where he received the American Institute of Architect medal.

 Lee worked for large corporate firms in New York and Chicago, and the experiences taught him he was best suited for a smaller firm that was hands-on and involved highly-specialized projects such as high-end residential spaces and small-scale institutional spaces. He moved to New Orleans, where he later opened Lee Ledbetter & Associates in 1996.  “I love this incredible group of people. There’s nothing like the act of creation. That’s what we aspire to do every day. We create art that has to accommodate a client’s wishes and fulfill their ambitions. Some make cardboard models, and some use the computer. We spend so much time cutting and pasting; it’s like we are still in kindergarten. We talk a lot about aesthetics and historical precedent, and we look at a lot of images. We might try to find the perfectly-shaped sofa for three days. Those details matter.” The landscape architecture is equally important to Lee. Mirroring the design philosophy of his childhood home, he wants to ensure a home’s outdoor space feels like an extension of the interior.

 Margaret admires her best friend, who has appeared on both U.S. and Canadian television productions of HGTV. His work has been exhibited in New York at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and many other significant galleries throughout the nation. Most recently, Lee, who has been a guest lecturer at Tulane University, was inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

 “Besides his huge talent and unique creativity as an architect and designer, Lee is enormously generous and devoted to all his friends, to his family, and to his employees, who are a kind of family to him. Like me, he is deeply serious about life, politics, art and the environment. And in the face of all that is difficult in the world, that level of seriousness can feel overwhelming and can be disheartening. But equally, we both love to laugh. Lee is fun-loving and very funny,” Margaret said. “And no less important to him than one’s responsibility to contribute to a better world, is the pursuit and appreciation of beauty, the experience of beauty in art, in nature and in people because beauty has a way of bringing calm into what often feels like a chaotic and unpredictable world.”

Lee has contributed to his surroundings for most of his life, beginning with his childhood gardens and artwork in Monroe, and his current city of New Orleans. Lee’s firm started designing for the New Orleans Museum of Art nearly 20 years ago. His team created the museum’s five-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden which includes a lagoon, 200-year-old live oaks adorned with Spanish Moss, and 64 sculptures. Lee’s firm is currently collaborating on phase two of the garden, which will launch May 15 and feature a 1,000-square-foot indoor sculpture gallery.

 One of Lee’s first projects was building the Slidell home of renowned painter George Dunbar, whose works appear in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the British Museum. “George is an extraordinary man. He’s as brilliant as he is talented and as kind as he is both of those. He’s had a huge influence on me.” The 2,500-square-foot house on a hill was daunting; the house could be seen from a mile away, and because it was small, each detail mattered to Lee. “George appreciated the artist in me. He trusted me, and he became a father figure.” Lee’s creation of George’s home has appeared in the New York Times and Architectural Digest, among other publications.

 These days, Lee not only continues to create, but he is sharing his creative methodology with others. In March, his new book, “The Art of Place: Lee Ledbetter Architecture & Interiors,” published by Rizzoli, and edited by Mayer Rus of Architectural Digest, was released. John Stubbs, Preservation Studies Director at Tulane School of Architecture and the son of the late Monroe architect William King Stubbs, wrote the foreword. In it he praised Lee’s “contemporary architecture that wisely extends the centuries-long classical tradition in Western architecture while remaining tethered to the vernacular traditions of the American South.”

 John described Lee as a modern architect because he tackles all aspects of the home: the landscaping, designing the interior, and even assembling the décor. And Lee does not limit himself to a single design approach, an ode to the variety of homes he grew up observing in Monroe.

 Lee said, “I am interested in designing a house and its interior with the homeowners in mind, incorporating both modern and traditional elements. I try to blur the lines between modern and antique furnishings so nothing is predictable; I think it’s so much more interesting that way. Why limit yourself? The world is large and generous, so we should be generous in our thinking.”

 In the book’s foreword, John also applauded Lee’s devotion to preservation: “I especially admire Lee’s wide-ranging rehabilitation projects, where he preserves the most distinctive extant designs and intervenes elsewhere in a respectful manner. His several New Orleans renovations prove this out, the best example being his own home, Marquette Place, a heroically preserved landmark in New Orleans modernism.”

 Lee shares his Marquette Place home with his husband Doug Meffert. Their house is three houses away from the childhood home of Lee’s mother Helen, who remains passionately proud of her third child. Lee’s childhood drawings are displayed in Helen’s home, and she speaks with adoration and emotion about Lee: “I knew from the time Lee was about three or four, that he was special.” At the age of 10, Lee decided he wanted his own room, so he decorated a tiny, triangle-shaped attic closet with posters and black lights and replaced the door with strands of beads. His new sleeping arrangement would be temporary, but his initiative left a lasting impression on his mother.

 “I thought it was grand. I remember thinking, ‘This is so original. Lee is so original.”