Tour a Southampton, New York, Landmark Known for Its Distinct Castle-Inspired Architecture
Designer Alvise Orsini revives an East End icon in his dramatic, maximalist style
For years, prospective buyers took a hard pass on a landmark mansion in the town of Southampton that had gone on and off the real estate market for more than a decade. To be sure, the Gothic Revival–style residence, called Balcastle, was an oddity in an upper-crust Long Island, New York, enclave better known for its shingled estates.
The history of the brick house is also foggy. It is said to have been built around 1911 by J. Edward Elliston, a well-known local craftsman and preservationist, for a Russian tycoon. The design was inspired by an Irish castle and features a two-story crenellated tower as well as a gazebo that allegedly housed bear cubs for its occupant in the 1930s, a Bulova watch heiress. More recently, interior designer William Sofield used it as a weekend house, adding his own distinctive flourishes before listing the home in 2010.
It took another designer to envision Balcastle’s latest incarnation as a full-time family residence. At the height of the pandemic, designer Alvise Orsini was summering in the Hamptons with his husband and their young twin sons—they lived in Dallas at the time—when he experienced a coup de foudre while driving by the property, its ivy-strewn red-brick façade aglow at dusk. The next day he learned it was for sale. “The interiors had seen better days, and the gardens were overrun. No one wanted me to buy it,” he recalls. “But I was mesmerized.
His vision for the decor—melding Jazz Age glamour with European élan—came to him in an instant. The Old World is thoroughly familiar to Orsini, who grew up in Venice and studied architecture amid the palazzi of the Grand Canal, before building his career in London and then Paris, where his skills flourished for a decade in the office of legendary decorator Jacques Garcia. “I’ve spent my whole career working in historical houses,” he says, “so I had the tools to rescue a ruin.”
Indeed, Balcastle needed to be rescued. Orsini undertook a gut renovation that expanded the original footprint and removed interior walls to create light-filled, symmetrical spaces framed by classical moldings. He then composed rooms layered with European antiques and works of art. His interiors juxtapose Louis XV sofas and chairs with Gatsby-era portraits and modern artworks.
The once-drab living room is now a vibrant salon pulsating with jewel tones and appointed with palatial furnishings, many designed by Orsini himself. He mingled claret-hued velvet and gold-fringed custom sofas and armchairs with Baker and Jansen cocktail tables, neoclassical metal lamps, and a Jef Lambeaux bronze sculpture from the 1800s. A nearly life-size depiction of a very dapper Douglas Fairbanks Jr. by Spanish portraitist Federico Beltrán Masses hangs on one wall, opposite a jazzy quartet of Andy Warhol prints from his 1985 “Reigning Queens” series. “It’s restrained drama,” Orsini explains. “I like over the top within strict boundaries.”
In the new kitchen and breakfast room, whose windows overlook the revived gardens, Orsini conceived a French orangerie, complete with an ornate Napoleon III chandelier and an upholstered Louis XV sofa that he commandeered as a dining banquette. “This is the room we spend most of our time in,” says Orsini, whose sons are now ten years old and attend school in nearby Sag Harbor.
While the family may gravitate toward the kitchen, it was the gazebo—along with the home’s romantic exterior—that convinced him to buy the house in the first place. In this octagonal structure, which overlooks the swimming pool, he has unleashed his enchanting eclecticism with fantastical results. “It’s so whimsical you almost lose your bearings,” Orsini says.
Draped with a canopy of fabric, the outdoor room is chockablock with quirky, disparate components that shouldn’t work together but gloriously do. The mix includes a plaster copy of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous elephant sculpture, a French chandelier composed of 18th-century love letters, spindly antique chairs from a Paris flea market, and a turquoise majolica planter. Meanwhile, an early 20th-century portrait by Cyprien-Eugène Boulet hangs above a plump Louis XVI sofa perfect, Orsini notes, for enjoying “macarons and a glass of Champagne.”
It’s a folly-like space that let the designer conjure an absolute fantasy. “With the gazebo,” he says, “I created a kaleidoscope of my imagination.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Gothic Romance.” Subscribe to the magazine.