For the first few years after he opened his dental office on North Coast Highway 101 in 1978, Dr. Howard Benedict commuted from a sailboat. According to a history the practice publishes on its website, he lived aboard a 34-foot Hans Christian moored in Oceanside Harbor, a boat he named The G.V. Black after the founder of modern dentistry. On nights when he worked late, he slept in the basement beneath the office. He worked late often, because seeing patients after their own workday was the whole idea.
Forty-eight years later, the same address in Leucadia is on its third dentist. Dr. Steve Horne, DDS, a University of Southern California graduate like Benedict, took over in 2017 after four years as a U.S. Army dentist that included a 2010 deployment to Baghdad. The chain of custody at 718 N. Coast Hwy. 101, a surfer to a surfer to a soldier, is a small case study in something that is getting rarer in American dentistry: an independent office handed from one owner to the next instead of being absorbed. This feature is built from public records and the practice’s own published history. Dentist News Today did not interview Dr. Horne, and coverage is never paid.
The evening dentist of Leucadia
The practice’s “Legacy” page is unusually detailed for a dental website, and it is the only public account of the office’s early years we could find, so what follows is the practice’s telling. After graduating from USC, Benedict started out working for Dr. West Leffingwell in a small round brick building on Aberdeen Avenue in Cardiff. Leffingwell let him see patients in the evenings after his own day was over. That arrangement, the page says, is where the evening-hours model began, and it let Benedict surf and dive in daylight.
When he opened at 718 in 1978, many of those patients followed him north. The original hygienists, named on the page as Lena, Luci and Lisa, kept the same schedule, seeing patients from 2 to 9 p.m. Benedict’s brothers, Mike and Chuck, were trained to make the office’s crowns and inlays. The page describes Benedict as a spearfisherman who carved his own wooden spear guns and shaped surfboards as a teenager, and it gives his working philosophy a name.
“Dentistry for the Quality Conscious”
Dr. Howard Benedict’s practice philosophy, as recorded on the practice’s Legacy page
Benedict owned the practice until 2000. He died, the page says, shortly after retiring that year, at the age of 55.
The second owner
Dr. Bogdan Madurowicz took over on Jan. 3, 2000. The practice notes that it was the same day a new stretch of Leucadia Boulevard from El Camino Real had its soft opening. Madurowicz, a San Diego native, graduated from Carlsbad High School, the University of California San Diego and UCLA’s dental school, and moved over from a practice in Oceanside to be closer to his family in Encinitas. As a UCSD student, the page says, he had lived on San Elijo Avenue in Cardiff, a few houses from Benedict’s first office.
He kept the practice for 17 years, and the page credits him with carrying Benedict’s philosophy forward alongside original staff, some of whom it says are still there. In April 2012, a release distributed through PR Newswire announced that he had been selected for San Diego Magazine’s “San Diego’s Leading Dentists” list. Federal provider records still list his name at the Coast Highway address. The office’s website notes that Steve Horne, DDS, was formerly Bogdan Madurowicz DDS, APC.
Fort Knox, Baghdad, Leucadia
Horne came to the address by a longer route. His biography says he earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Brigham Young University and his DDS from USC in 2007. A separate author biography published by MedicineNet adds that he made the dean’s list there, taught restorative dentistry, prosthodontics and tooth anatomy to other students, and volunteered with AYUDA, a USC student program that has provided dental care in Los Angeles, Orange County, Mexico and Costa Rica.
After graduation he went on active duty with the U.S. Army and practiced at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for four years. Federal provider records list a Kentucky dental license alongside his California one. In 2010, according to both biographies, he deployed with a medical unit to Baghdad, providing dental care and triage support to military and civilian workers. The MedicineNet biography says he received multiple Army Achievement Medals and the Army Commendation Medal, and served as a company commander.
Fort Knox was itself in transition during his years there. The post, about 109,000 acres south of Louisville, had been the home of the Army’s Armor School for decades; the school moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2011, the same year Horne left the Army. The Army’s Human Resources Command began relocating to Fort Knox in 2009.
Back in California, he joined a private practice in La Jolla and was credentialed as a dental consultant with Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. Since 2012, the MedicineNet biography says, he has written dental articles for MedicineNet and WebMD. He lists membership in the San Diego County Dental Society, the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry and a Spear study group, and is a preferred Invisalign provider. The federal NPI registry lists him as Steven Bryant Horne, DDS, at 718 N. Coast Hwy. 101, and the Dental Board of California shows his license, number 60245, as current and active with no discipline.
The practice page frames his arrival in terms of continuity: he describes joining an Encinitas dental family “established and nurtured” by Benedict and Madurowicz, with a mission of continuing their legacy. He and his wife, Christy, married in 2002; their twins were born in 2014 and a third child in 2017.
Leucadia, still a little funky
Leucadia was founded around 1870 and named for Lefkada, one of Greece’s Ionian Islands. A San Diego development company gave its streets Greco-Roman names such as Hymettus, Neptune, Phoebe and Daphne, and Neptune Avenue, which runs along the bluffs, is about 140 yards west of the office. The beaches below sit at the foot of steep cliffs. When Encinitas incorporated in 1986, Leucadia joined Old and New Encinitas, Cardiff-by-the-Sea and Olivenhain in the new city, whose name is Spanish for “little oaks.”
The office’s address sits on the community’s historic main corridor. In 2003, residents and merchants formed the Leucadia 101 Main Street Association to support the North Coast Highway 101 strip, where a custom T-shirt shop that has been in Leucadia since 1975 sells shirts reading “Keep Leucadia Funky.” Encinitas had 62,007 residents in the 2020 census.
The neighborhood around the office is older and wealthier than the county as a whole. For ZIP code 92024, the Census Bureau’s 2020–2024 American Community Survey estimates a median household income of $158,507 and a median age of 43.8, against $106,268 and 37.3 for San Diego County. About 4.5 percent of the area’s civilian adults are veterans, below the county’s 6.9 percent.
Why a handoff matters
The three-owner story at 718 runs against the grain of the profession. The American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute reported in 2024 that 13 percent of U.S. dentists were affiliated with a dental service organization in 2022, up from 8.8 percent in 2017, and that 27 percent of dentists five or fewer years out of school were. Half of dentists who graduated more than 25 years ago work solo, the ADA found, compared with 17 percent of those within a decade of graduation. When an owner retires, selling to a group is an increasingly common exit.
Here the office went from one individual dentist to another, twice, and the current owner’s website publishes the history of the two men before him. For patients, that shows up as continuity: the practice says it has seen generations of families over more than four decades, and its Legacy page says some of the original staff stayed on through the transitions.
What the office offers now
The practice describes itself as a general and cosmetic office. Its service list includes exams and cleanings, non-surgical gum treatment, fillings, inlays and onlays, crowns, bridges, implants, veneers, whitening, full-mouth rehabilitation, sedation and emergency care. Its technology page lists CEREC equipment for same-day porcelain restorations, a Biolase EpicX laser for soft-tissue procedures and whitening, digital X-rays, intraoral cameras, Invisalign, and OraVerse, a drug that speeds the reversal of numbness after dental anesthesia. The homepage says the office works with specialists in Encinitas, Leucadia, Carlsbad, Solana Beach and La Costa when a case calls for one. More is at stevehornedds.com.
Questions patients ask
What are the office hours?
The practice lists Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is closed on weekends. The phone number is 760-753-7185. The evening hours of the Benedict era are not part of the current schedule.
Can I get a crown in one visit?
The practice says its CEREC system lets many patients receive a porcelain crown or onlay in a single appointment.
Does the office handle dental emergencies?
Yes. The practice lists emergency dental care and asks patients with urgent problems to call 760-753-7185.
Which insurance plans are accepted?
The website does not publish a list of plans or say whether it accepts Medi-Cal Dental. It lists financing through Lending Point. Patients should call to confirm coverage.
This feature was written from public information only. Dentist News Today did not interview the practice, and coverage is never paid. Corrections are welcome through our contact page.
Sources
- The Legacy, Steve Horne, DDS
- Dr. Steve Horne, Steve Horne, DDS
- About Our Encinitas Dental Practice, Steve Horne, DDS
- Advanced Technology, Steve Horne, DDS
- Cosmetic & Emergency Dentistry Encinitas, CA (homepage), Steve Horne, DDS
- Contact Steve Horne, DDS in Encinitas, CA, Steve Horne, DDS
- Steven B. Horne, DDS (author biography), MedicineNet
- Bogdan R. Madurowicz DDS Selected For “San Diego’s Leading Dentists”, American Registry via PR Newswire, April 18, 2012
- USC dental students’ AYUDA mission (Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica), The San Pedro Sun, 2007
- NPI 1609062561: Steven Bryant Horne, DDS (CA and KY licenses), CMS NPPES NPI Registry
- NPI 1215145651: Bogdan R. Madurowicz, DDS, CMS NPPES NPI Registry
- License lookup: Horne, Steven Bryant (Dentist 60245), Dental Board of California / Department of Consumer Affairs, checked Nov. 9, 2026
- Fort Knox, Wikipedia
- Leucadia, Encinitas, California, Wikipedia
- Encinitas, California, Wikipedia
- ZCTA 92024 profile (ACS 2020–2024 5-year estimates), Census Reporter / U.S. Census Bureau
- San Diego County profile (ACS 2020–2024 5-year estimates), Census Reporter / U.S. Census Bureau
- Practice modality by the numbers, ADA News (Mary Beth Versaci), Feb. 20, 2024
- Geocoder result for 718 N Coast Highway 101, Encinitas (distances computed from Census geocodes), U.S. Census Bureau
