Location: Milwaukee, United States

Design Team: Johnsen Schmaling Architects

Area: 307.14 m²

Year: 2023

Lead Team: Brian Johnsen, Sebastian Schmaling

Structural Engineering: Core 4 Engineering

Photography: John J. Macaulay

Design Features: Curtain House occupies 307.14 m² on a long-vacant infill parcel in Milwaukee's Lower East Side. Only 24 feet wide and tightly held between two century-old houses, the site was acquired from the city's Department of City Development by lifelong urban residents building their first home. Johnsen Schmaling Architects matches the three-storey house broadly to the neighbouring ridge lines, repairing the street edge without disguising the building's contemporary identity.

The narrow plot and municipal parking requirement shape the section from the outset. A tandem garage, compact vestibule, building services and a family room facing the rear garden share the ground floor. Above, two double-height volumes hold a linear open courtyard between them and are connected by a glazed gallery. One contains an open living hall for cooking, dining and lounging, opening to the courtyard on one side and a small balcony towards the Milwaukee River on the other. A delicate stair supported by glass panels rises to the principal suite and home office, while two further bedrooms occupy the volume across the court.

The street facade begins with a contradiction familiar to urban homes: generous glazing admits daylight and suggests openness, yet curtains are still needed for privacy. Rather than choosing between transparency and enclosure, the architects translate the folds of domestic drapery into a full-height fixed screen. Closely spaced vertical louvers rotate by gradual increments, becoming more porous in front of glazing and completely opaque where solid walls or the garage door sit behind. The facade is therefore not a uniform veil but a calibrated record of the rooms it protects.

As pedestrians move along the street, the stationary louvers appear to shift like fabric, carrying the elevation through degrees of transparency. The same screen shades the south-facing facade and limits overheating and excessive solar gain. Eco Mark-certified hybrid wood-and-aluminium extrusions combine a timber surface with dimensional stability and durability, while high-performance glazing and integrally coloured three-coat cementitious stucco complete the restrained envelope.

White and grey finishes inside amplify the daylight filtered through the screen. In the living hall, walnut cabinetry gives the kitchen a warmer, denser presence and marks the social centre of the house. The courtyard, glazed gallery and aligned openings break the long plan into spaces that can be crossed and seen through. Curtain House turns privacy, daylight and environmental control into a public architectural expression: its pleated street face neither imitates the historic neighbours nor rejects their scale, but establishes a newly calibrated boundary between domestic life and the city.

Design Team: Brian Johnsen and Sebastian Schmaling founded Johnsen Schmaling Architects in Milwaukee in 2003. They met as graduate architecture students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and later worked together in a local practice. Johnsen holds a Master of Architecture from UWM. Berlin-born Schmaling studied at the Technical University of Berlin, UWM and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he completed a Master of Architecture and Urban Design with distinction.

The studio specialises in high-end residential and commercial work and provides services spanning master planning, schematic design, construction administration, furniture and graphics. Each project begins with a close reading of site and programme, bringing materiality, construction and building technology into the development of the central idea. Its buildings are often formally restrained, gaining character through proportion, depth, precise assembly and the control of light.

Both founders are Professors in Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and regularly lecture in the United States and Europe. The practice received an Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices award in 2008 and was selected for Architectural Record's Design Vanguard. Its work has earned more than 70 professional awards. Led by Johnsen and Schmaling, Curtain House received an AIA Wisconsin Merit Award, a Residential Design Architecture Award, a Milwaukee Magazine Home + Design Gold Award and a 2025 American Architecture Award.