The Turnbull House is the former residence of Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull. A merchant by trade, his passion was books. By the time he died in 1918 at age 49, he had leveraged his family inheritance to assemble over 55,000 books, manuscripts and artifacts with a focus on New Zealand. He designed this brick home in 1916 to accommodate up to 60,000 books. This Alexander Turnbull Collection became the nucleus for the New Zealand National Library.
