837 Airlies Street

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Patricia Kettner designed this one-storey L-shaped home for her young family in 1958. The exterior of the home is clad in tongue-in-groove vertical wood siding. While the front of the residence is reserved in its use of windows, allowing privacy from the street, the rear-facing walls feature large floor to ceiling windows to let light in. Patricia Kettner was a graduate of the University of Manitoba. She was a visual artist, as well as a registered architect.

Garden City is a neighbourhood in the north-western part of Winnipeg. It has a land area of 2.32 square kilometres and a population of nearly 6,000. Garden City, then located in the city of West Kildonan, was developed by Model Homes Limited, a firm which estimated a cost of $20 million to develop nearly 420 acres. Plans for the project were first announced in 1951, with construction beginning in 1955. The boundaries of the Model Homes Limited subdivision were, to the east, the Canadian Pacific railway, McPhilips Street to the west, to the south the historic boundaries of the City of Winnipeg and Kildonan Avenue to the north. Model Homes Limited plans included the development of 1,500 homes, a shopping centre, six schools, churches, parks and recreation areas. Expectations were that the building of Garden City would raise the population of West Kildonan from 14,000 to 20,000. The president of Model Homes Limited was David Weinbender; the company was a conglomeration of four contractors and had coalesced around the notion of this development in 1946. The name "Garden City" came at the suggestion of Model Homes Limited lawyer E.H. Crawford. Along with the general concept for the area, this name was drawn on the Garden City area in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Plans were for the preponderance of homes to contain five or six rooms and cost approximately $14,5000 to $20,000. Most of the homes in the area are designed in a modernist-influenced ranch-style vein with clean lines, large windows and such built-in functional details as carports. Input was given on the project by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.