In 1951, civil servant Richard Gray Collins purchased two lots of land with a frontage on Ascot Street in Thorndon, Wellington. The site featured a number of cherry-plum trees and a bulldozed flat area suitable for a house. Shortly afterwards, Collins wrote to the Wellington City Council notifying them of his intention to construct a house on the lot fronting Ascot Street. He described the house he required as a 'single storey dwelling, in weatherboard, with flat roof, of an area of about 1000 square feet'. Collins then commissioned Frederick Herz Schwarzkopf (1888-1961) to design the dwelling.
Schwarzkopf was an Austrian refugee who had worked as a structural engineer in Vienna before the Second World War. To escape persecution by the Nazis, he and his wife fled to New Zealand in 1940, where he was employed as a structural engineer by the Housing Department. His employment by the Department limited his private commissions. The only other evidence of a private work by Schwarzkopf is a house, of a similar design to the Ascot Street house, that he built for his own use at 35 Margaret Street in Wellington.
Completed in 1951 for 2800 pounds, the single storey house at 22 Ascot Street was an example of 1950s Modernist design. It stood out in its setting amidst the nineteenth-century Victorian cottages that are predominant in Thorndon. The house featured a mono-pitch roof with wide overhanging eaves, and was distinctively black and white. Its beveled-back weatherboards are coated with creosote, and its door and window joinery are painted white, in a New Zealand Modernist tradition. The house has three bedrooms, and is planned around a central core of utility spaces. The open plan dining and living spaces, and the terrace opening from the living room to the garden, are key features of 1950s residential design. Elements such as the built in furniture and the joinery, including the skirtings, architraves, and cornices, are also typical of the period.
The Collins avoided altering the house during their residence and felt that extending it would destroy its essential character. Consequently, when Barbara Collins became pregnant with their fourth child, the Collins made the decision to put the house up for sale, rather than adding another bedroom. The house was then purchased by renowned New Zealand composer Douglas Gordon Lilburn (1915-2001).
Lilburn pioneered the tradition of New Zealand composition and was the central figure in its development between 1940 and 1980. He studied music at Canterbury University College and the Royal College of Music in London. His relocation to Wellington in 1949 to teach at the newly established Music Department of Victoria University College brought to a close his first, highly productive phase of composition. During this period he developed a number of landmark, prize-winning works, and encouraged New Zealand composers to find their own voice in his position as director of the first composers' class at the Cambridge Summer School of Music. As a lecturer at Victoria University, Lilburn went on to pioneer works in the 'new world of electronic music', and played a vital role in the development and promotion of New Zealand music by founding the Wai-te-ata Press Music Editions (1967), the electronic music studio at Victoria University (1966), and the Lilburn Trust (1984).
Shortly after Lilburn arrived in Wellington, he bought a house in Paekakariki, where he 'greatly enjoyed the coast for three years'. While the coastal scene inspired works created during this period, Lilburn found that he became 'too isolated from the main Wellington context'. In 1953 he purchased a house at 356 Tinakori Road. Lilburn noted that he 'refurbished it with great labour, but was never too happy there in a rather hostile neighbourhood'. The closeness of the houses meant that his piano practice disturbed the neighbours, and led to a tense situation between Lilburn and others on the street. Reflecting on his purchase of 22 Ascot Street in 1959, Lilburn noted:
In '60 I gained the house at 22 Ascot Terrace (precisely, had the key and opened the door on Xmas Day '59) and have enjoyed this marvellous quiet mid-city hospice and garden ever since, and hope that I may retain it until I die, or am no longer fit to retain it.
Lilburn remained at 22 Ascot Street until his death in 2001. Over that 42-year period, Lilburn left the house essentially unchanged. Its central, yet private location suited Lilburn's personality and requirements as a composer. Lilburn noted that:
I have a welcome supply of visitors from near and far, readily able to drop in for vino / coffee / gossip in this conveniently central area. Beyond that I want no sociability or functions, could not endure communal living anywhere, and would be desolately lonely out in some suburb. Above all I have the blessed peace and quiet here from any radio or TV sound other than my own, a rare and essential condition for my happiness and well-being.
Lilburn welcomed students to his door and the house became 'a Mecca for composers, musicians, and artists alike'. One of his students, Gordon Burt, reflected that
The door is always open...the house is lean, yet filled with books, several icons of New Zealand paintings. There is wine, a bowl of cubed bread, and cheese or olives, wild greenery against uncurtained windows, and a view - across Bolton Street knoll to the skyline and harbour - which, from just down the road, once took Rita Angus's eye. Quiet talk, fuelled by the rising warmth of the wine, drifts from chat about colleagues and friends to business at the university and so to all that is music and beyond...
Lilburn's move into the house roughly coincided with his second phase of output, when Lilburn pioneered New Zealand compositions for electronic music at Victoria. During this period, Lilburn's house provided him with the essential conditions for creating compositions, and may also have inspired his works. According to Philip Norman, Lilburn postulated that environments 'in a subtle way affect our manner of listening' and 'impress themselves on our minds in a way that will ultimately give rise to forms of musical expression'. Norman further noted that there is clear evidence of the environment as a generating source for the electronic music Lilburn produced from the 1960s. Lilburn's biographical notes, which are filled with poems and reflections on the plants and the quality of light in his garden, gives rise to the impression that his garden may have been a key source of inspiration.
Following his retirement in 1980 at the age of 65, Lilburn's reflections on his home are filled with references to it as a much loved and essential retirement home and hospice. Musings on his work in the garden occupy large tracts of his diaries in later years and appeared to provide him with particular comfort. Of this period he noted that:
...I coast along with chores in house and jungle as good therapy, and pleasure from them to combat boredom.
Upon Lilburn's death in 2001, the issue of the future of the house arose. Prior to his death, Lilburn had expressed a number of opinions about the use of his house. Lilburn emphatically, and consistently stated that he did not want the section 'developed' or the ambience that he had so enjoyed destroyed.
Please understand that I will not contemplate any idea of selling the property to some 'developer' who might bulldoze the beautiful trees, put up rows of garages south and east topped with 2-3 storey townhouses, and so destroying the whole ambience of the neighbourhood.
However, when the Wellington City Council proposed special zoning in the Thorndon area to limit changes to buildings, Lilburn resisted. The zoning meant that changes would be limited to those that would blend with the nineteenth century architecture that predominated in the area. Applying such rules to alterations to a house constructed in the mid-twentieth century was clearly inappropriate. Yet it is unclear whether it was this, or a general opposition to limitations, which prompted Lilburn to note that:
I emphatically do not want restrictions 'on all future external alterations, additions, fencing, painting', in terms of some irrational concept, anymore than I welcome fanciful ideas of a 'Tourist Walk' through my property.
In the early 1990s, Lilburn proposed that after his death, his residence be used as a guesthouse for scholars visiting the Alexander Turnbull Library, and perhaps the School of Music at Victoria University. He expressed this idea on a number of occasions. However his will instructed the executors to sell the property at a time of their choosing and to transfer the proceeds to the Lilburn Endowment Trust operated by the Turnbull Library Trustees. In 2005 the property was placed on the market and made subject to an NZHPT heritage covenant. It was purchased by the newly formed Lilburn Residence Trust that same year for use by New Zealand's first composer in residence.
