Southampton Town Eyes Purchase of Casa Basso, Castle in Westhampton for Waterfront Park

Southampton Town is in line to buy the 1.5-acre waterfront property that has long been home to the Casa Basso restaurant and its neighboring historic faux medieval castle for $4 million.

The town’s plans, if the purchase is approved by the Town Board this month, would be to raze the restaurant building, opening up the property to the waters of Beaverdam Creek for public access, and to restore tidal marshlands at the shoreline. The castle building, which is more than 120 years old, would be preserved.

The proposal will be the subject of a public hearing at the Town Board meeting next Tuesday, December 10, at 1 p.m.

The castle structure dates to 1902, when it was built as a pottery studio by Theophilus A. Brouwer Jr., a celebrated pottery maker, sculptor and inventor.

Brouwer had opened a pottery studio, Middle Lane Pottery, in East Hampton in 1894, where he developed a new technique of pottery making called “fire painting” that burnished a glaze on his pottery with a kaleidoscope of colors and an iridescent glossy surface.

He moved his pottery studio to Westhampton in 1902, renaming it Brouwer Pottery, and constructed the castle in the mold of a real — and presumably much larger — castle he’d seen while studying in Spain. He created a sculpture garden on the surrounding property, which he called Pine-Wold Park.

In 1928, the Basso family opened Mama Basso’s restaurant in a new waterfront building next door to Brouwer’s castle, their customers entering the property beneath the extended rapiers of two ceramic cavaliers created by Brouwer and posed as ready to duel.

Brouwer died in 1932, but his artwork remains highly valuable today, and his works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the Smithsonian Institution.

The Basso family sold the restaurant in the mid-1950s to Valerio “Rene” Mondini, who paid homage to his predecessors in the name for his restaurant, Rene’s Casa Basso.

Mondini ran the business until 1986, when he sold it to longtime employee Bejto Bracovic and his wife, Zyli “Julie” Bracovic, who ran the restaurant until this year. Casa Basso hosted its last dinner service last month.

“The castle is a historical, iconic and inspirational site in the Town of Southampton for over 120 years, and continues to contribute to the local and cultural landscape and is an important opportunity for historic preservation,” the town’s pitch for the purchase of the land says.

The money for the $4 million purchase of the land would come from the Community Preservation Fund and would satisfy the goals of the CPF program for historic preservation, open space preservation and expanding recreational resources in the town.

The property would be dedicated as a park, with the mission of creating public water access, preserving tidal marsh wetlands in the town’s designated Wetlands Target Area, which includes more than 1,000 properties identified as desirable for acquisition to protect or restore tidal wetlands ecosystems and to improve storm resiliency.

The town has not said how the castle building — currently home to Jerri’s Cakery & Confections, a gourmet artisan cakes bakery — would be used once owned by the town, but the purchase proposal notes that the dedication of CPF funding would include future management and stewardship costs.

Park, Preserved Farmland for East Quogue

The town is also considering using the CPF to make other multimillion-dollar purchases this month to create a new 15-acre public park and to preserve 10 acres of farmland off Lewis Road in East Quogue.

The deal would preserve three properties totaling 25.1 acres off Lewis Road that the town is looking to purchase portions of outright and to remove all development rights on the remainder to keep the land as working farmland.

The town would pay the current owner of the land, Adrian Cenni, $5.48 million in total: $3.95 million for the outright purchase of 15 Lewis Road, a 15.3-acre, mostly wooded property and $765,000 each for the two farmland parcels at 17 and 19 Lewis Road, which total 9.8 acres.

A house on the 15 Lewis Road property would be demolished before the sale is completed and the property, would be made into a public park with hiking trails leading into the property and around a large man-made pond at its center. The property contains a nest used annually by bald eagles.

The development rights purchase on the two farmland lots would be a so-called “enhanced rights” purchase that puts legal easements over the property allowing it to only be used for food crops and requiring that it be actively farmed.

By putting such stringent limitations on the use of the land, the enhanced rights program, which the town began in 2014, aims to reduce the market value of land to prices as low as $25,000 an acre, so that working farmers can afford to purchase it.

Jacqueline Fenlon, the town’s CPF program manager, said that the town is already working with the Peconic Land Trust to identify a local farmer who could purchase the underlying farmland from Cenni once the town has purchased the development rights.