Jenna and Michael Morton’s Summerlin home has a 60-foot outdoor slide, a DJ booth and a wine room that holds hundreds of bottles.
3 min
Jenna and Michael Morton have created some of the best-known nightclubs and restaurants in Las Vegas.
But when building a home in the area for their family, they veered away from the glitzy excess of the Strip in favour of a calming, desert retreat.
That’s not to say entertainment was an afterthought: The roughly 2-acre property in the Summerlin neighbourhood has a 60-foot outdoor slide and a DJ booth.
“We are in Las Vegas,” Jenna said. “It’s part of what we do in this town. We do fun.”
Now, after about 20 years of fun, the Mortons’ three children are out of the house, and they are listing the home for $19.5 million.
Michael is a son of Chicago restaurateur Arnie Morton, who founded Morton’s The Steakhouse, which has more than 50 locations nationwide.
His brother Peter Morton co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe, and Michael and Jenna operate restaurants including Crush at the MGM Grand and La Cave Wine and Food Hideaway at Wynn Resorts .
The couple paid $1.25 million for the vacant Summerlin site in 2003. At the time, they were living in Chicago but planning to move to Las Vegas to be closer to their work.
Located in the Ridges, a gated community about 15 minutes from the Strip, the property is at the end of a cul-de-sac abutting the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.
“The first time we were there, there were wild burros behind us,” Michael said.
The single-story house spans about 9,400 square feet and curves toward the canyon for privacy and mountain views.
“The curve is an embrace of the mountains,” said Jenna during a video call as she walked outside, the vista framing her face.
In contrast to the over-the-top vibe of Las Vegas hotels and casinos, the couple’s aesthetic at home is what Jenna described as “Japan meets desert,” with clean lines and neutral colours.
The house has seven bedrooms; the primary bath has a soaking tub made out of a boulder.
A wine room has colour-changing Lucite pegs that hold hundreds of bottles. A separate, roughly 530-square-foot guesthouse has a roof deck.
The property is mostly flat, with the exception of a sloped section where the Mortons built the tiled slide, which drops into the pool.
“I looked at it and said, ‘There will be a slide on that hill,’” Michael recalled. It isn’t just children who have enjoyed it—he and Jenna and many of their friends have taken a turn. “A lot of adults hit that slide,” he said.
The Mortons said they entertained frequently, from fundraisers to a birthday party where their son filled an outdoor trampoline with bubbles.
For Jenna’s 40th birthday, the couple hosted a 1960s-themed party that began with a 200-person sit-down dinner, followed by toasts and karaoke.
Michael enlisted the rock band Cheap Trick to make a surprise appearance during karaoke.
As Jenna took the microphone and started belting out their song “I Want You to Want Me,” the band began playing behind her. “We took the rods out of the reactor that night,” he said. undefined
Although selling is bittersweet, the Mortons said they want something smaller now that their children are grown.
The couple—he is 61, she is 59—have a second home in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and they plan to build a smaller house in Las Vegas.
The luxury market in Las Vegas has exploded over the past few years, said listing agent Kristen Routh-Silberman of Douglas Elliman.
There were 76 sales in the Las Vegas area above $10 million in 2025, up from 59 a year prior, she said. The record is held by a home at the Summit Club that traded for $35 million in 2024.
A recent building boom means inventory is finally catching up to demand, according to Routh-Silberman.
The spring market has started early this year, and there seems to be more activity thanks to demand from California and Washington transplants seeking tax advantages, she said.
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
