Johnsen Schmaling Architects Draws a Timber Curtain Across a Narrow Milwaukee Infill House

For roughly two decades, a 24-foot-wide gap sat on a block of Milwaukee's Lower East Side. The city had condemned and demolished an abandoned house there and then held the empty parcel. A lifelong city dweller bought it from the Department of City Development to build his first home. He asked Johnsen Schmaling Architects for a house that could stand between two century-old neighbors without pretending to be one of them. The result, Curtain House, completed in 2023, is a three-story, 2,700-square-foot volume. It runs nearly the full depth of the lot and matches the height of the houses on either side.

The facade gets the attention, and it should. Vertical louvers of wood wrapped around an aluminum core turn at gradually shifting angles, the way fabric folds when it hangs. The more interesting move is behind the facade: the architects cut the middle out of the long box. That one subtraction does most of the work in a house this narrow. It brings in daylight, splits the program into two volumes, and gives the owner an outdoor room that the street cannot see.

A Quiet Neighbor with a Different Accent

On the street, Curtain House follows the rules of the block and changes the language. Its height and width match the gabled wood-frame houses beside it. It drops the pitched roof, the porch and the punched windows. What remains is a flat-topped box whose front is mostly screen. Tall slot windows and a cantilevered canopy over the entry are the only openings that read directly from the sidewalk.

Some observers have argued that the house turns its back on its context. We read it the other way. A house with a deliberately veiled face is a fair response to a dense, demographically mixed street where front windows sit a few steps from strangers. Window drapes are among the most common features of the American urban house, and the design abstracts them. That gives the facade a local reference, even if it is not a stylistic one.

Louvers That Behave Like Fabric

The louvers are pinned only at the top and bottom, and their angles rotate along the length of the facade. The screen opens up where glazing sits behind it and closes completely in front of solid walls and the garage door. A curtain works the same way: you pull it back where you want light and leave it drawn where you don't. Here that logic is fixed in place and tuned to what lies behind each panel.

The screen also works on climate. On the southern exposure it acts as a brise-soleil, filtering sun and views together. The material choice matters too. The architects rejected solid timber because they expected it to weather badly, and chose a timber-wrapped aluminum profile instead. You keep the warmth and grain of wood up close, and you get a core that should hold its line through Wisconsin winters. At dusk the screen turns into a lantern, and interior light leaks through the gaps in warm vertical stripes.

Reading the House from Above

The aerial views show the move the street hides. The rectangular block is carved open at its center, leaving two volumes at either end, linked by a glazed gallery. Among the pitched roofs and heavy tree canopy, the house reads as a compact, flat-roofed counterpoint. The downtown skyline sits close behind it, a reminder of how central this once-vacant lot is.

From the sidewalk, a glass balcony rail and lit glazing above the concrete entry steps hint at life on the upper floors. Still, the street never gets the full picture. That is the point. The house shares as much as the owner chooses to share.

The Courtyard as the Real Front Door

The linear courtyard is on the second floor, lifted above the ground-floor garage, entry vestibule, mechanical space and family room. This is where the client's wish to open the curtains and the windows finally comes true. Long sliding glass walls pull back from the living hall, and the white-paved terrace becomes part of the kitchen, the dining area and the lounge.

In plan the courtyard looks like lost floor area. In use it is probably the most valuable square footage in the house. It brings light deep into a lot that would otherwise depend on its two narrow ends. It also gives the owner an outdoor space shielded from the street, which is rare for a house this tight. The timber-clad upper volume rises over the courtyard and carries the facade's material language into the private interior of the site.

Interiors in Walnut, White and Glass

Inside, the palette is restrained. White and grey surfaces hold the light, and walnut does the expressive work: it appears in the kitchen cabinetry and in the panel wall that lines the circulation. A stair with glass panels leads from the living hall to the master suite and home office on the upper level. Its transparency keeps a narrow plan from feeling walled in.

Small moments matter as much as the big gesture. Take the sitting corner framed by the timber fins. From the inside you see the louvers as a filter, with trees and neighboring houses broken into vertical strips. The screen that looks closed from the sidewalk turns out to be generous to the people inside it. The second volume holds two more bedrooms with access to the patio, and the bedrooms and the living hall each get their own relationship to the courtyard.

From Window Drapes to a Facade Strategy

The design process is unusually legible. The black-and-white studies of sheer curtains, wooden shutters and figures behind drapery show the architects working from a familiar domestic gesture rather than a formal one. A paper relief of tiered vertical fins tests how light and shadow move across the screen. The massing model shows the two dark timber blocks bridged by a lighter connector between white gabled neighbors.

We like that the concept stays this literal and this useful. The curtain is not a metaphor added afterward. It is the brief for the facade: privacy, light control and a softened edge between public and private life.

Plans and Drawings

The stacked floor plans make the organization clear. Service and parking sit at grade, with a tandem garage that meets the city's on-site parking requirement. The open void sits between the two end volumes above. The sections show the house stepping with the sloping ground toward the rear, where terraced patios lead down to the backyard. The five-step axonometric sums up the whole strategy: extrude the lot, carve out the middle, and insert two volumes. The exploded axonometric lifts the slatted screen off the dark box, which shows it as a separate layer hung in front of the building.

Why This Project Matters

American cities are full of narrow, publicly held lots left vacant after demolition, and most stay empty because they seem too tight to build on well. Curtain House shows that a 24-foot parcel can hold a generous, light-filled home with private outdoor space. You get there by giving up some floor area for a courtyard and by treating the street facade as an active filter instead of a wall of windows.

The project has been recognized with a Gold Award at the Milwaukee Magazine Home + Design Awards, a 2023 Residential Design Award and a 2025 American Architecture Award. The more lasting lesson is about method. The architects started from an ordinary object, the window drape, and turned it into a precise facade system matched to what each part of the house needs. Infill design rarely gets that kind of specificity, and it is worth copying.

Curtain House by Johnsen Schmaling Architects, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Area: 2,700 sq ft (251 m²). Completed 2023. Photography by John J. Macaulay.

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