If you don't add the "1", so your # is just:
"800-888-2555", then it will format like this:
(800) 888-2555
Don't know of any customization you can do in Contacts format. Of course, it would be pretty neat if there were a way to do it. If nothing else, I'm sure you could record/edit/write a VBA macro to do this for any selected contacts, or possibly to check through them all and change those that need changing, but that's not an automatic method, really.