curtain house - milwaukee, wisconsin
The Curtain House is a private residence on a long-vacant, narrow parcel embedded in Milwaukee’s Lower East Side, a dense, demographically diverse neighborhood known for affordable housing options and its lively mix of young families, blue-collar workers, students, and artists. The clients, lifelong urban dwellers looking for a buildable lot in the central city to build their first home, acquired the 24’-wide infill property directly from the Milwaukee Department of City Development, which had taken ownership of it two decades earlier after condemning and razing an abandoned house there.
The building is a long, narrow volume tightly sandwiched between two century-old homes and reimagines the typological conventions of urban infill dwellings with a respectful but unapologetically contemporary addition to the area’s aging housing stock, one that repairs the street edge and mends the neighborhood fabric. The program is distributed on three levels, matching the ridge height of the adjacent structures.
The ground floor, which needed to satisfy the city-mandated on-site parking requirements, is shared by a tandem garage and a small entry vestibule, along with the building’s mechanical infrastructure and the family room overlooking the backyard. From the entry vestibule, stairs lead visitors up to the second floor, where a pair of two-story volumes bracket an exterior courtyard. A glazed gallery running parallel to the linear courtyard connects the two volumes. One of the volumes accommodates an open living hall that combines kitchen, dining, and lounging. The living hall spills out onto the courtyard patio on one side and a small balcony with views of the nearby Milwaukee River on the other. Delicate, glass panel-supported stairs link the living hall to the upper-level master bedroom suite and home office. The second volume at the opposite end of the courtyard houses two additional bedrooms with access to the patio.
The building’s street façade was conceived as a playful abstraction of the ubiquitous drapes that cover virtually all windows in urban residences. Those domestic curtains, while inherently antithetical to the concept of glazed transparency, serve a necessary purpose: they provide privacy from the public realm and modulate the amount of light entering the building. Echoing the undulation of residential drapery, the carefully detailed façade of the Curtain House is composed of tightly spaced vertical louvers, installed at gradually rotating angles to form a continuous, highly animated screen wall that stretches across the entire elevation. The screen’s various degrees of openness respond to the building enclosure behind it, transforming seamlessly from visually most porous in glazed areas to entirely impenetrable where solid walls or the garage door are located. In addition to its function as a privacy screen, the louvered façade acts as a sun-shading device that protects the home’s south-facing elevation from overheating and excessive solar gain.
The louvers utilize Eco Mark-certified hybrid wood/aluminum extrusions that offer long-term dimensional stability and overall durability. High-performance glazing and an integrally colored three-coat cementitious stucco system round out the deliberately subdued exterior material palette. Interior finishes are dominated by whites and greys that augment the natural light filtering into the spaces. In the open living hall, the warm hues of the walnut kitchen cabinetry complement the neutral interiors, unambiguously marking the Curtain House’s social epicenter.