There are expensive homes, there are wildly expensive homes, and then there is “The Sand Castle,” the Versailles-inspired oceanfront mansion in La Jolla that looks like it was airlifted from the French Riviera and dropped onto one of the most valuable pieces of coastline in Southern California.
The Sand Castle was first listed in October 2024 for $108 million. At that price, it was not merely the most expensive home for sale in San Diego. It was attempting to more than double the county’s all-time residential sales record. That record currently belongs to billionaire Egon Durban, who paid $44.1 million for a San Diego-area mansion in 2023.
Now, after several price adjustments, The Sand Castle has been marked down to $87.5 million. That’s a $20.5 million cut from its original November 2024 asking price of $108 million. But even after the discount, a sale anywhere close to the new price would still obliterate the San Diego County record.
At $87.5 million, The Sand Castle would not just edge past the record. It would nearly double it.
The Sand Castle
The Sand Castle sits directly on the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, one of the most exclusive coastal communities in California. The property belonged to the late billionaire Darwin Deason, the Dallas technology entrepreneur who founded Affiliated Computer Services and later sold the company to Xerox in a $6.4 billion deal.
Deason bought the original La Jolla home and a neighboring parcel in 2009 for a reported $26 million. What followed was not a simple renovation. It was a 15-year transformation. Deason reportedly spent around $60 million turning the property into a 13,000-square-foot seaside palace inspired by the Palace of Versailles and the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the legendary five-star hotel on the French Riviera.
The result is one of the most unusual private homes in California. Here is a video tour:
The estate includes a seven-bedroom main house and a three-bedroom guest house inspired by Le Petit Trianon, the château on the grounds of Versailles. The interiors are packed with Old World details: marble floors, imported French fireplaces, antique statues, gold-accented ceilings, elaborate mosaics, crystal chandeliers, custom furniture, and 18- and 24-karat gold accents.
The main house includes a two-story entry hall, a wraparound terrace, an oval dining room that seats 16 beneath a 19th-century crystal chandelier, a nautical-themed bar, a fitness center, and a primary suite with an oceanfront terrace, private study, and separate his-and-her bathrooms.
The grounds are just as dramatic. The home has a saltwater pool lined with blue Thassos marble tiles, two cabanas, a beachfront kitchen, direct beach access, and a private elevated beach. Deason even imported soft white sand from Augusta National Golf Club, reportedly spending $40,000 on the sand alone.
That private beach is one of the home’s rarest features. The Sand Castle also has a custom seawall and direct oceanfront access, features that listing agents have said could not be replicated today under current California coastal building rules.
The house is not expensive simply because it is large. It is expensive because it combines an irreplaceable location, obsessive custom construction, rare coastal access, and a level of design that feels closer to a boutique European hotel than a normal Southern California beach house.
(Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
Who Built The Sand Castle & How’d They Earn Their Fortune?
The Sand Castle was built by self-made billionaire Darwin Deason.
Deason was born in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1940. According to his family, he was born on the dirt floor of the Deason Homestead near the end of the Great Depression. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and took a job as a mail clerk at Gulf Oil.
That mailroom job became his entry point into the corporate technology world. Deason moved into data processing, and in 1968 he relocated to Dallas to join a small startup that later became MTech. He became CEO at just 29 years old.
At MTech, Deason helped build a company that provided technology and data processing services for financial institutions. The business eventually became a successful subsidiary of MBank and was later sold to EDS, the technology services giant founded by Ross Perot. That sale gave Deason his first major payday.
According to his family, Deason briefly considered retiring after that liquidity event. It did not last. He played golf for a few days and realized he hated it. Soon after, he started calling investment bankers in search of another business to buy.
That search led him to a small bank data processing company in North Dallas. Deason bought it and built it into Affiliated Computer Services, better known as ACS.
ACS specialized in business process outsourcing and back-office technology services. It handled the kind of essential but unglamorous work that large corporations and government agencies need to function: data management, billing, transaction processing, customer-service systems, and administrative technology.
Under Deason, ACS grew aggressively through acquisitions. The company eventually became a Fortune 500 fixture with around $6 billion in annual revenue and tens of thousands of employees worldwide. Its clients included major corporations and government agencies. ACS went public in 1994, and in 2010 Xerox acquired the company for $6.4 billion.
The deal made Deason one of the largest individual shareholders of Xerox and cemented his status as a billionaire. At the time of his death in December 2025, Deason’s net worth was $1.3 billion.
Deason’s personal business philosophy was famously summed up in one word: “hustle.” He handed out “hustle” cards and books, preached the value of working early and late, and credited relentless effort for his rise from poverty to billionaire status.
The Sand Castle was the ultimate expression of what that kind of fortune could buy: a private, Versailles-inspired, oceanfront compound with imported sand, marble mosaics, gold accents, custom seawalls, and views in three directions.
And it was not his only trophy property.
After Deason’s death, his four-story penthouse at 8181 Douglas Avenue in Dallas was also listed for sale. The 14,000-square-foot residence, which he owned for roughly two decades, hit the market for $17.5 million. The penthouse includes five bedrooms, six full bathrooms, seven half-bathrooms, and interiors described as a mix of European boutique hotel and luxury yacht.
Between the Dallas penthouse and the La Jolla Sand Castle, Deason’s estate is now selling off two extremely customized homes that say a lot about the man who built them. One was a sky-high Dallas command center. The other was a fantasy version of Versailles on the Pacific.
