A Secret Castle Hides Among Sullivan's Island Beach Houses

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Sullivan's Island has beach cottages, million-dollar renovations, and one particularly strict height limit. It also has a castle.

Mugdock Castle sits quietly among the island's homes, a restored 1891 church turned private residence turned ultra-luxury vacation rental, complete with a medieval-style turret and stone walls nothing else on the island can match. It's easy to miss unless you know what you're looking at, which is exactly how owner Vince Graham likes it.

Graham didn't set out to own a church. Built in 1891 as the Church of the Holy Cross, the building has had a strange life: seized by the government in 1905, converted into an Army Post Chapel, sold off as a private home by the 1970s. Graham picked it up in 2002 after an earlier plan to relocate the structure fell through, and his first instinct was to flip it. "What the heck do I need a church at the beach for?" he thought at the time.

Then he started digging into the history, and the church stopped being a problem to solve.

The renovation kept the original stone walls and added the turret that makes the place look like it wandered off a movie set. What it's become since: one of the more discreet high-end rentals on the East Coast, the kind of place that shows up in property records instead of press releases. Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel have stayed here. So have Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, back in 2012, before either of them was as famous as they are now.

Sullivan's Island's own planning director has called it a genuinely "unique architectural style," which is putting it mildly for an island otherwise built on raised beach cottages and strict setback rules. Nothing else here looks remotely like it, and nothing else has this kind of guest list either.

The quiet part is the point. Graham isn't marketing a celebrity hideaway, he's renting a piece of Charleston history that happens to have a turret, and the famous guests are a byproduct, not the pitch. For everyone else, it's a reminder that some of the most interesting real estate on this island isn't the newest build, it's the one that almost got torn down twice.

This is a summary of an article published in the Post & Courier. Click here if you'd like to read that article.