A striking white concrete-and-stucco home that stands apart from Regina’s traditional wood houses. Designed by 5468796 Architecture for adventurous clients who relocated from South Africa.
Highlights:
- A striking white concrete-and-stucco home that stands apart.
- Designed by 5468796 Architecture for adventurous clients.
- Built on a narrow lot with a strong focus on privacy, daylight, and open living conditions.
- Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s courtyard concepts, adapted for a Canadian climate.
- Features layered concrete construction, sculptural interiors, and custom curved wood windows.
- The result is a private yet light-filled house that feels unexpected, thoughtful, and personal.
This house doesn’t whisper rather shows up bright, pale, and unapologetic. There’s no getting around from this house, a smooth white stack of concrete and stucco sitting among Regina’s familiar, with rough-edged wood cottages like it missed a memo and decided to stay anyway.
The architects, Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture, will tell you the clients never intended to play it safe.
David and Jane Arthur had already travelled across continents once, leaving South Africa behind for a prairie city of about 250,000 people where winters bite hard. Winters drop to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit and summers can climb past 100.
Compared to that, designing a strange house felt quite manageable. More than a decade ago, they bought a narrow lot, 125 feet long, 40 feet wide, with a perfectly forgettable bungalow squatting in the middle of it.
They didn’t come to the architect with any visual demands, also no clipped magazine photos or ‘we want it to look like this. Something that would be out of the box. Also privacy mattered a lot to them. Jane works emergency shifts and sleeps when the rest of the neighborhood is mowing lawns or revving trucks.
She needed quiet and seclusion, like a bunker type. But here’s the catch, they also needed sunlight and easy access to the outdoors for gardening. And yes one more thing, no doors between rooms at all. Not exactly a small ask.
So the architects started playing with the plan.
Long, flat, rectilinear schemes wrapped by perimeter walls, punctured by open-air courts you could step into straight from glazed interiors.
What emerged draws, in a loose and self-aware way, from Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt courthouse studies of the 1930s.
Here, on the Canadian plains, 5468796 bent the idea to fit real lives and real winters. The bedrooms went upstairs. A separate apartment slipped below grade, ready for family, renters, whoever shows up.
Second floor was cleverly made in a quiet way. It floats above the courts without blocking them. Two separate bedroom suites carved out, each with its own stair.
No shared hallway drama. Below, from a sunken courtyard enters daylight down into the lower apartment’s bedrooms and living space, because nobody wants a basement that feels like one.
“The plan is magic,” says principal Colin Neufeld, and he’s not wrong. Everything hinges on it. The house measures about 3,450 square feet, but it never feels bulky.
Even getting inside is a bit of choreography. You don’t just walk up and knock. From the street, you drift along the south edge of the lot, then turn left at a freestanding concrete cross wall. Then one last move and there it is, a dusky red wood door, handmade by David Arthur himself. Past that, a compact vestibule as you turn right. Suddenly the space opens wide.
The living and dining area stretches out, glass on both sides, framed in black fiberglass. To the south, a narrow slice of sky drops in like a clean cut. To the north, you find a sunken court that pulls your eye down and out.
Above your head, things get a little weird. But hold on, its done on purpose. The ceiling jumps to double height, then curves, wrapped in plaster that’s been warped just enough to feel off-kilter.
Off this main space, another court opens up near the kitchen, backed by the blunt concrete wall of a one-story garage. Next to that, a carport stretches under a 24-foot-high stucco canopy that thrusts the second-floor roofline outward with some real confidence. Gardening gear, extra cars, snow shovels, all tucked in. Along the north edge, a separate path leads quietly to the lower apartment, ending at a stair that drops into the sunken court.
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Navdeep is a PHP programmer by profession, & rider by passion with a strong interest in writing, reflection, and travel. His writing draws from daily experiences across online and real-world settings, often influenced by an interest in interior design and how spaces affect mood and function.
