The six-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath lakefront mansion at 3432 N. Lake Dr. is one of the gems of the upper East Side, which is saying something on a stretch of road littered with beautiful piles.
The 8,544-square-foot mansion is for sale for $4.9 million, listed by Desty Lorino of Keller Williams Realty.
Take a look at the rathskeller, which alone would arguably be worth the cost (if you had the money, of course).
The house clad in Bedford stone was originally located at another lakefront location, further south. It is a remnant of a long-gone collection of Downtown homes that once occupied part of what is now Juneau Park.
The house was located at 303 Martin (now State) St., overlooking the lake with 11 other homes on a block bordered by State, Kilbourn, Astor and the now disappeared Juneau Place.
The three-story home, with a striking Flemish gable, was designed by Chicago architect William August Fielder. Fielder also was the interior designer of the Nickerson Mansion – now home to The Richard H. Driehaus Museum – as well as the architect of 58 school buildings for the city of Chicago and that city’s landmark Germania Club.
Fiedler was born in the East Prussian city of Elbing in 1842 – since 1945 the Polish town of Elblag – and arrived in the U;S. in 1871, where he worked as a architect in New York before joining the exodus of architects, engineers and builders who headed to Chicago to help rebuild the city after the Great Fire.
Fielder was heavily focused on interior design and within a few years had his own furniture company, too.
Fielder did work around the Midwest and the Lake Drive home in Milwaukee was built in 1890 for Samuel A. Field, who was born in 1820 and moved to Milwaukee in 1849 from New York.
Field was a successful real estate investor. One of his properties was sold to Summerfield Methodist Episcopal Church for the construction of a new church building on Kilbourn Avenue in 1857.
In addition to building this gorgeous house, Field and his wife Francis had a large collection of art and they reportedly had the home specially designed to show off their impressive array of works.
Francis Field was an advocate for women's education and was a member of the Wisconsin Society of the Archaeological Institute of America. She was also one of the founding stockholders of the Athenaeum (now the Woman's Club of Wisconsin).
Samuel Field died in 1911 and and Francis passed away in 1918. Two years later, the family sold the house to George Louis Kuehn, who, when Juneau Park was to be expanded to the north, had the house taken apart in 1928 and reassembled about three miles north on Lake Drive.
However, he converted the three-story house to just two stories and used the leftover materials to construct a four-car garage. The move also gave him the opportunity to add a solarium and a copper tile roof.
All this work, it seems, was overseen by architects Robert Messmer & Brother. (Fielder had died in 1903 and thus wouldn’t have been available even if Kuehn wanted him.)
Kuehn – who founded Milcor Steel Company, which later merged with Chicago's Inland Steel Company of – and his wife Viarda, like the Fields, were art collectors. (Their children donated Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant's painting "Evening on the Seashore – Tangiers" from the family collection to the Milwaukee Art Museum.)
When Kuehn retired in 1940, the couple moved to Watersmeet, in the Upper Peninsula, but maintained the Lake Drive house.
George died in 1948 and Viarda passed away in 1960 and their family sold the home two years later.
The house is truly a stunner and although there clearly have been updates, the interior would appear to hew to Fielder’s philosophy of interior architecture.
“We strongly advocate the use of different styles in different rooms, to avoid the monotonous effect invariably produced by the fanatic apostles of the so-called Eastlake or Modern Gothic,” Fielder is quoted as saying.
“For the same reasons it will be necessary for articles of luxury, as easels. hanging shelves, cabinets, etc., to use motifs from the Mooresque, Byzantine, Japanese, etc., though diametrically opposed to the prevailing style of the room.”
In 2022, a Woman's Club newsletter recounted the story of a terra cotta wall plaque – depicting Michelangelo's Pitti Tondo – that Francis Field bought near Florence on a European vacation with her huband in 1896.
Francis Field donated the plaque to the Woman's Club the following year and it ended up in a storage room. Rediscovered, it was gifted to the owners of the Field mansion on Lake Drive.
"Linda and Jock Mutschler and their family have lovingly cared for their historic Field home since purchasing it in 2014. Linda is the household’s researcher, but both share their appreciation and sense of responsibility to the home and Milwaukee. The Historic Building Committee feels the same. As benefactors of our beautiful Club, we know the plaque would never be restored properly to hang within our walls again.
"A cheerful conclusion to an interesting 124-year-old story built on our Club’s history of strong, philanthropic members."
You can see many photos and get all the details of the home in the listing, which is here.
If the interior – including that rumpus room! – doesn’t wow you enough, or the 3.8-acre lot, consider that the property has just under 300 feet of lake frontage.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
