Theodore “Ted” Irwin Morey was born in Milwaukee in 1902, the son of Robert G. and Grace Morey. He grew up in North Prairie in the Town of Genesee, Waukesha County, where his father, an insurance agent, also operated a farm and milk condensery. Ted graduated from St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, after which he attended Carroll College (today Carroll University) in Waukesha. Following college, he went to the Lake Forest, Illinois area with a college classmate. It was there that he began his career in real estate, having developed two subdivisions and a golf course. In 1927, Ted married Waukesha native Margaret Kewer, after which he continued in the real estate business in Wisconsin. His first local subdivision was that of Westowne. Located just outside of the Waukesha city limits, it is considered among the first, if not the first, Waukesha suburb. It was here that he chose to build his first home in 1928—a modest Tudor Revival-influenced cottage—and it was that same house that he would remodel into the existing two-story Southern Colonial in circa 1939, when an expanding family required additional living space.

Following Westowne, Morey would go on to develop a significant number of subdivisions that would expand the City of Waukesha in all directions. By 1970, with just over forty years in the business, Morey himself estimated that he built approximately 400 homes and developed over fifteen subdivisions in the Waukesha County area. Two decades later (in 1991), at which time he was self-identified as semi-retired, he estimated that he had sold more than 5,000 lots in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. His obituary would quantify his subdivision list as numbering over thirty. In addition to residential development, he was also responsible for the construction of several shopping malls. After over sixty years in the real estate business, Theodore “Ted” I. Morey earned the moniker “dean of Waukesha real estate developers.”

It is a private home and is not open to the public.