A hundred years ago, I was lucky enough to get the inside scoop on one of Zube Aylward’s most iconic creations—his Mushroom House in Emerald Estates.
It was a personal tour, along with photographer John Bartosik (no, we’re not related, but we both have Polish blood), plus a sit-down chat with Zube and his unassuming wife, Pat. It was all for an article in Whistler Magazine, triggered by Zube’s legendary, albeit selectively constructed character, and the expression thereof in the homes he built in a style so eclectic and self-possessed one of his pals coined the term “Zubest architecture” to describe it.
At this point, dear reader, please note: I don’t use the term “iconic” lightly. Or overuse it, as has been the popular tendency lately. But this amazing structure, a personal creative statement far beyond mere “home,” has come to represent the best of at least some of Whistler. Ironically, both built forms—the house and the Village—started pushing up out of the ground in 1980 like giant mushrooms. And both are still with us, albeit changed, like all things we humans touch.
Now as Whistler grows and morphs into something else, Mushroom House feels more symbolic than ever, maybe even a bit nostalgic, especially since Zube was murdered in 2018 in a horrific, mysterious case while he was living in the last home he and Pat built on a remote acreage at Anderson Lake. More on that shortly, but back to my tour with the man himself…
Zube, who definitely had his own way of doing things, including faking amnesia if you asked how old he was, explained that, to him, a house was like a sculpture. “It happens right from the roots of the rocks. You take and build from the elements right there in the environment,” he said.
It should feel like an adventure and it should be refreshing—”like a bit of a sleep or a meditation.” Or like nature. (Don’t know about you but, personally, I love the idea of rocks having roots. And houses resembling mushrooms.)
While Zube was planning Mushroom House, he said he was also thinking of those secret little hideaways most of us had as kids: Under lilac bushes filled with scent in June; hastily-erected blanket tents; or behind the curtains in a room filled with humans much taller than 4’ 2”. Cosy, innocent interludes I think hippies and back-to-the-landers were, and still are, often trying to mimic.
Zube and Pat, with tongues firmly in cheeks, called it The Hovel, their term of endearment for the shack they lived in before Mushroom House was habitable. It took six long years before it was done.
You have to admit, The Hovel is quite the nickname for such a glorious structure that references nature in so many ways: The curvilinear forms rendered in wood, metal, stone—all anchored by the 15-tonne granite boulder brought in to act as a heat retainer for the computerized self-heating/cooling system. Remember, this was the late ’70s when planning started. Whoever heard of computerized anything then, especially in your home?
An undulating roof; beautiful stained glass (all by Yves Trudeau, the glass artist in the Lower Mainland, not the serial killer/biker in Quebec); walnut panels from an old Scottish castle; swirling parquet floors in the kitchen; marble lily pads in the bathroom; copper pennies carefully punched so that the dates are legible, and used as washers for the bronze nails in the mahogany flooring. Even copper-cable spider webs interwoven with tree-trunk bannisters like human limbs lining the staircase to one of the 11 different levels.
Watching over it all from the elegant living room was a giant dragon with quartz eyes perched on the mantle of the massive stone fireplace built by Bernard Thor, another multi-talented Renaissance man who built his own off-grid creation of a home at Anderson Lake, and stayed behind to protect it (successfully) from the devastating Casper Creek wildfire last summer.
Prior to Mushroom House, the Aylwards poured their energies into another home just up the road they dubbed The Willing Mind—all before their final Zubest creation at Anderson Lake. There Zube was violently murdered in a case that’s never been solved. I’m still waiting for someone to make a terrific podcast about it.
All this sprang to mind as I read Liz McDonald’s recent article in Pique, about the sale, once again, of the Aylwards’ former Anderson Lake home and property, complete with its huge garden and wilderness setting. At the same time, a copy of Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus lay open on my desk. Euell and Zube: Both throwbacks to the wild and wonderful ’70s. Both dead way too young. Both unwaveringly true to themselves, even after a couple of missteps. And both huge in their respective communities for their love and appreciation of nature.
If you’ve not stumbled on Euell Gibbons yet, let’s just say his iconic (ahem) book Stalking the Wild Asparagus about foraging wild food is a hippie classic now enjoying a renaissance with the next wave of wonderful, young neo-hipsters. And for good reason.
“We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect that we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty,” wrote Gibbons.
Although his book and his thinking didn’t blow up until the late ’60s, Gibbons wrote that line, which could have come from Zube himself, back in 1962 when Garibaldi Lifts was just starting to develop Whistler as a ski area and Whistler Mountain was still called London Mountain. (The name didn’t change until 1965, when construction also started on the Roundhouse.)
If you’re into foraging wild food, stand by for my next instalment. Meanwhile, check out the Whistler Public Library—they have plenty of books on same. Unfortunately, not Gibbons’ masterpiece, but a little birdie told me if you go online here and ask for it, the librarians just might add it to the collection.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who loves that Whistler Museum has back issues of Whistler Magazine in its fonds, including the Summer 1983 issue with the article on Zube excerpted above.
