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When Lawton Stables owner Didi Summers says her passion lies in helping the community, not in horses or horse riding, she’s got the watery eyes to prove it.
“I’m known as The Stable Lady, which is so comical because I’m actually allergic to horses. If I touch one I have to go wash my hands immediately,” said Summers, who in a previous life was a corporate lawyer in New York City.
Summers and her husband, Andrew, leased the stables from Sea Pines in 2007 and have been systematically renovating its facilities and reinventing its services and focus. The couple — along with their sons Nicky, 19, and Chris, 17, and daughter, Michelle, 13 — moved here from London in 2006 so Nicky could be coached at the Smith Stearns Tennis Academy. But the family had barely settled when Nicky made the Swiss national team at age 15 and headed back overseas.
“It was terrible, I cried my head off,” Summers said of having her oldest child so far away. Nicky made his way back to the island after a year and is now playing varsity tennis at Davidson College near Charlotte, N.C. In the meantime, Michelle began to show a serious interest in horse riding, and after passing Lawton Stables “eight times a day” while chaperoning her kids to riding lessons, golf lessons, tennis lessons and school, Didi decided she and Andrew could make the stables into much more than what they were.
Besides improving animal care there, the couple has built up the riding program with a new boarding barn and has brought in a national trainer to begin a junior riding academy for serious riders who want to compete on the national level.
“I’ve seen firsthand what it takes to become a top (junior) professional tennis player and a golfer. Riding has a lot of similarities, but it’s not been presented that way,” Summers said. “If you wanted your child to take a lesson a week from the golf club pro, you wouldn’t expect to be a serious competitor. It’s the same with riding: To get to that level, it’s not one or two lessons a week, it’s really a 20-hour-a-week commitment.”
They have teamed up with Hilton Head Preparatory School, which both Michelle and Chris attend, and where Andrew has just become board chairman, to provide the educational component for any rider who enters the fledgling International Riding Academy. So far there are two students, including Michelle, but they’re confident more will follow.
The stables, which also include an animal farm, pony rides, boarding facilities, summer camps and more, is not a profitable business yet, but that’s not why the Summers say they’re involved.
“I look at this more as a project; it’s not a business yet. I hope that we can make it profitable at some point, and after a few years it will be able to sustain itself,” Summers said. “We’re just in a really fortunate position that we can give back to the community.”
That fortunate position stems in part from Andrew’s successful career in asset management, where he co-founded his own company in London in 1994, which is where the couple met.
“If there’s one word that describes our family it’s ‘international,’” Summers said. She was born in Hong Kong and is half Chinese. Andrew is British; he grew up in South Africa, where he has started a charitable foundation to improve education there. Nicky and Chris were both born in Switzerland, Michelle in London, and their father, Didi’s ex-husband, lives in Morocco.
“We travel an awful lot,” she said.
Yet they’re perfectly happy to call this American island their home base. And despite all the sneezing, Summers is happy to be bringing new life to Lawton Stables.
“I wanted to do something in the community and this is how it manifested itself,” she said. “It could have been a park or a school, but it just happened to be the stables.”
