The story of this French-inspired fantasy begins in 1993. That’s when garden designer Craig James Socia, a former New York graphic artist whose résumé includes a stint as advertising designer for Ralph Lauren, climbed into his red pickup truck and headed to the East End for some respite from his urban existence. Fortuitously, he rented digs from the sister of landscape designer Victoria Fensterer, who soon put Socia to work at Grey Gardens, where she was replanting the property with new gardens worthy of the renovated historic house.
It wasn’t long before Socia realized he’d found a new calling. “I just love gardening,” he says, and after a single season working for Fensterer, he launched Craig James Socia Garden Design. For the first couple of years he would move back to the city in the winter months, but before long he was a year-round Long Island resident, honing a timeless gardening style that soon attracted attention from clients including interior designer Jamie Drake. Socia is fond of marrying manipulated formal elements (including topiaries and manicured hedges) with more exuberant compositions of trees, shrubs, and plants, both annuals and perennials. Among his trademarks: walls, portals, gazebos, and arches made of tightly layered horizontal stone; extravagantly comfortable hewn redwood benches and birdhouses; Zen-inspired bridges; and twig follies.
In 1999, Socia bought a house off Accabonac Road in East Hampton. A few years later he acquired an adjacent property and built a graciously large second home for himself, stunningly awash in beiges and browns and exceedingly impressive. Eventually he acquired a third parcel, bringing his holdings up to a full two acres. What could Craigmoor, as he calls his “estate,” now need? A castle, of course.
This new structure is a dreamy concoction of The Little Prince crossed with Hamlet’s Elsinore. Working with Brian Brady of Brady Design in Southampton, Socia drew his inspiration both from classic French architecture and from a gatehouse on nearby Heatherwood Lane. “It has a turret,” he says, “but it’s more Tudor-like.” Socia’s turret would not look out of place in the Loire Valley.
The house, where Socia now lives (he rents out the other two), consists of a main floor with a huge combined living and dining room and an eat-in kitchen, with two bedrooms upstairs and his office downstairs—convenient for the garden designer, who typically starts his workday at 4 a.m. A vertigo-inducing circular stair inside the tower connects the floors and is drama personified. It could be daunting, but true to Socia’s spirit, it’s actually quite playful.
Socia’s castle was also designed with a twist: The structure can be converted into a garage and guesthouse, should he ever find the need. Socia laid tumbled-stone pavers in a herringbone pattern on the floor of the main salon and installed hinged carriage doors that swing open into the entry garden. Even the light fixtures reference old-time carriage lanterns.
The “French Norman” interiors combine solid forms and subdued colors with a heady, harmonious palette of black, white, and gray punctuated with the zing of metal and the hush of stone. Furnishings come mostly from far-flung sources, though many of the large casework pieces are from Restoration Hardware. Socia collects fine antiques, like the metal bed in the master suite, the dozen Louis XVI–style dining chairs, and the living room’s leather Chesterfield sofa, next to which sits a chair now upholstered in lively blue mohair. (Socia found it on a New York sidewalk.)
The kitchen table, bought at a garage sale, spent much of its life in Lee Radziwill’s sunroom; the chairs are Versace floor samples, one from Milan and the other from New York. And the vintage wallpaper in the downstairs powder room, with its repeat of book-laden library shelves, was discovered on a vacation trip to Harbor Springs in his native Michigan. (Socia hails from tiny Frankenmuth, a.k.a. “Little Bavaria,” which draws three million tourists annually.)
In addition to his passion for antiques, Socia collects and lives with a variety of statuary, ranging from busts of French nobility to a twisted figure of Samson (it’s a fragment, but the lion’s paw survives). On the walls he has hung architectural renderings of sailboats, an anonymous Old Master oil of a French cavalier, and a set of small, colorful paintings by an upstate New York artist, Leon Salter, who went by the name of Zouté (they’re a series of studies for giant murals designed for the New York World’s Fair of 1939). Having given up his New York apartment long ago, it appears Socia has fully embraced living on the East End. “It’s a much better life than I had in the city,” says the king of this mini castle, potentially the most glamorous garage in the world.