Jason Kuwayama and Leah Busse share a bedroom but enjoy their own space inside the modern property on the city’s Lower East Side
5 min
Jason Kuwayama hardly ever goes to the front section of the new house he built in downtown Milwaukee’s Lower East Side. That is where his girlfriend, Leah Busse, plays “Call of Duty” in her designated game room—a space filled with her collectibles and art.
Instead, Kuwayama, an attorney, enters through the back of the house and spends most of his time in the main living area, an open, light-filled space with no clutter.
The two sections of the house are separated by a long hallway and an outdoor courtyard.
It is a similar scenario upstairs, in the primary suite: The two share a bedroom, but Kuwayama’s pristine bathroom is down a long hallway, and separated by the laundry room, from Busse’s, which is usually filled with clothes.
This arrangement suits them both well.
“My style is reductionist. I am a bit fastidious,” says Kuwayama, 43, who spent around $1.9 million building the house over 3½ years, finishing in 2021.
“I am a mess monster,” says Busse, 38, who works for a home-building company. “Jason wanted me to have my own space that he didn’t have to see.”
The separation between the front of the house and the back was part of a larger scheme for the house, designed by Brian Johnsen and Sebastian Schmaling of Milwaukee-based Johnsen Schmaling Architects to help create privacy in a demographically dense location.
Kuwayama bought the long, narrow—24-foot-wide—infill lot for $35,000 from Milwaukee’s Department of City Development. It sits tightly between two other houses and the setback is right up to the edge of the sidewalk, a requirement of the city aimed at preserving the neighbourhood’s character. Most of the other homes on the street are traditional, two-level structures with pitched roofs built as affordable housing a century ago—and most have the drapes drawn on their front windows to block prying eyes.
To allow the same privacy as those drapes but still let in light, Johnsen Schmaling came up with an exterior facade that acts as an abstract curtain, with slanted fins made from a hybrid of wood and aluminium. The tightly spaced vertical louvers are installed at gradually rotating angles with various degrees of openness, in part to imitate the movement of curtains and to respond to whether there’s glass or solid wall behind it.
“It creates a sense of mystery,” says Brian Johnsen, whose firm dubbed it Curtain House. The fins also act as a sun-shading device to protect the home from overheating in the summer.
A courtyard, bracketed between the front two-story section and the back two-story section, acts both as a buffer and a source of light, since it is open to the sky. Light comes into the house through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that line the hallway along one side and the rooms (the kitchen one side, Busse’s game room on the other) on each end.
The main living area is open from the courtyard to the big windows and balcony that look over the river in back, also allowing in flood of light. The kitchen has a white island with an induction range and cabinets without hardware that open with a push, adding to the streamlined effect. The pantry is in back of the kitchen, also behind hardware-less doors.
The staircase, which leads both downstairs to the garage entry and a mud room and a cigar room and upstairs to the primary bedroom, has transparent glass panels supporting the tread on the ascending part, making the main floor feel wider and allowing a view of the river. The furniture is modern and sparse: a sea green Room & Board sofa, a glass Noguchi coffee table and a Barcelona chair.
Outside, the terrace is covered in fine grained rock and has a stairway with three platforms that leads down to the river. It has a pastoral feel, with trees and bushes fringing the property.
Kuwayama’s urban, modern, minimalist, open-plan, colour-free aesthetic is partly a revolt against his childhood home, a French chateau-style house in the Brookfield suburb of Milwaukee. His mother liked wallpaper and carpeting. His father leaned toward teak and Midcentury Modern art. The result was a compromise, with lots of small, separate rooms and bathrooms with their own colour (one avocado green, one brown and one pink).
Busse’s taste veers more toward traditional: an old manor with big wood banisters filled with knickknacks, she says. But she says she wasn’t interested in the design of the house because it was Kuwayama’s project from the start. Working for a home builder, she didn’t want to think about house plans when she was at home—and she wanted to move to a house with a big yard in the suburbs, she says.
Living in inner Milwaukee was also a form of rebellion for Kuwayama. He says when he was a teenager, growing up in the suburbs, it was implicit that he wasn’t to go downtown. After studying undergrad at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., he attended Marquette University Law School, right in downtown Milwaukee, and stayed there after he graduated, eventually buying a condo along the north side of the river, about a half mile from his new house.
The couple met in 2014 on $2 taco night at a local restaurant called BelAir Cantina, when Kuwayama and his friend bought drinks and food for Busse and her friend. Busse promised to meet him at the same place the following week, but never showed. A few weeks later, she saw him at a Starbucks. (Locals call the city “Smallwaukee” because running into people you know is so common). Kuwayama retaliatorily ignored her, but she tracked him down and asked him out.
Busse, along with her dog and cat, moved into Kuwayama’s 1,150-square-foot condo in 2016. They liked living together but the space was too small, says Kuwayama. “You could never get away from anybody. You couldn’t separate at all,” he says. He saw the lot for sale and negotiated the price down from $140,000 to $35,000, in part because the land was so difficult to build on, he says. Kuwayama says the city was supportive of his project, allowing variances, because it wants the neighbourhood to remain single family homes.
Milwaukee has been going through a process of urban revitalisation for decades. Once a centre of manufacturing, attracting immigrants from across the world, Milwaukee’s population hit a peak of 741,324 in 1960, making it the 11th-largest city in the country and a centre of brewing beer. The city was immortalised in the TV show “Laverne & Shirley,” about roommates who worked at a brewery there.
Like many Midwestern cities, Milwaukee was hit hard by the recession in the 1970s and 1980s, while at the same time many of the more affluent residents moved to the suburbs. Over a 30 year period, from 1970 to 2000, due to the relocation of industry and competition from emerging markets overseas, manufacturing employment plummeted by more than 77,000 jobs, and accounting for nearly 95% of all job loss in Milwaukee since 2000, according to the City of Milwaukee. The latest census puts the city’s population at 577,000.
In the 1990s, the city implemented its Riverwalk initiative, a 3-mile pedestrian path that goes along the Milwaukee River, connecting downtown to the Third Ward. The city estimates property values around the path have grown by $1.5 billion since 1993 and moves are under way to expand it.
Architecturally, the city hasn’t evolved as quickly. Polish Flat and German Duplex structures—two-family homes with one unit stacked on top of the other—still dominate the street where Kuwayama built his house. Homes in the area have been increasing in value, up around 25% over the past year as of October 2023, according to Redfin. A few blocks away, a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, 1,160-square-foot, 19th century house that was remodeled sold for $254,000 in September 2023, while a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,662-square-foot unit in a newly renovated condo building with a courtyard sold for $612,000 in July 2023.
Kuwayama says the reaction from people walking by his house (captured on security cameras) is mixed: Some love it, others are put off by the fins on the facade. One guy routinely takes dates through their back deck to their platforms overlooking the river. But he doesn’t mind. “I’m committed to the city of Milwaukee,” says Kuwayama. “Being accessible to the community is part of that.”
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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.
