Designer Alvise Orsini Restores Gothic Revival Balcastle in Southampton, New York

Key facts

• Balcastle is a Gothic Revival–style mansion in Southampton, New York, said to have been built around 1911 by J. Edward Elliston for a Russian tycoon.
• The design was inspired by an Irish castle and includes a two-story crenellated tower and a gazebo that allegedly housed bear cubs for a Bulova watch heiress in the 1930s.
• Interior designer William Sofield used the house as a weekend residence before listing it in 2010.
• Designer Alvise Orsini discovered the property during the pandemic while summering in the Hamptons with his husband and twin sons, then living in Dallas.
• Orsini grew up in Venice, studied architecture along the Grand Canal, and spent a decade in the Paris office of decorator Jacques Garcia.
• The renovation expanded the original footprint and removed interior walls to create light-filled, symmetrical spaces framed by classical moldings.
• The living room includes a Jef Lambeaux bronze sculpture, Baker and Jansen cocktail tables, a portrait of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. by Federico Beltrán Masses, and four Andy Warhol prints from his 1985 “Reigning Queens” series.
• The gazebo features a plaster copy of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s elephant sculpture, a French chandelier made from 18th-century love letters, antique chairs from a Paris flea market, a turquoise majolica planter, and an early 20th-century portrait by Cyprien-Eugène Boulet above a Louis XVI sofa.