The von Fircks family had been Courland nobility for generations, part of the Baltic German aristocracy that had ruled this corner of the empire since the Northern Crusades and continued under Polish, Swedish, and Russian sovereignty. They built manor houses and estates across what is now Latvia and Estonia, ran the agricultural economy, and dominated the Lutheran Church. By the late 19th century they were a confident class with European tastes and considerable money, and Heinrich von Fircks's exchange agreement with his elder brother Otto in 1883, recorded in the land register the next year, was the kind of paperwork that families like theirs routinely signed. Building a townhouse atop Talsi's highest hill was an expression of that confidence. So was importing your trees from Germany.

Latvia declared independence in 1918, fought its War of Independence into 1920, and then turned to one of the most radical land reforms in interwar Europe. The Latvian Agrarian Reform of the 1920s confiscated and redistributed the great Baltic German estates. The Fircks family, like most of their class, repatriated to Germany. Their land and their townhouse were assigned to the Ministry of Education. In 1923 the State Talsi Secondary School opened in the building, on what is now K. Milenbach Street 19, and would later acquire the status of a gymnasium. In the same year the school's history museum was founded inside it, the seed from which the present Talsi Regional Museum grew.

Theodore Dzintarkalns (1874-1937) was a teacher with the right kind of obsession. Responding to a national call from the Latvian Ethnographic Museum, he spent the 1920s gathering tools, clothes, jewelry, books, and folk objects from the surrounding parishes. By 1928 the school museum he had organized held 8,500 items. The high school principal Ansis Dreimanis remembered later that the collection 'became quite famous and many excursionists came to see it.' Dzintarkalns himself considered the museum one of the greatest postwar achievements in Talsi. He did not live to see what would happen to it next.

When Soviet and German armies fought across Latvia in 1940-1945, the museum's archive and most of its objects were lost, taken to Germany or destroyed where they stood. The town's lawyer, Vilis Kaijgar, was sent to Siberia, and the Soviets nationalized his house on Rozu Street 7. In September 1945 the surviving items from two scattered Talsi museums were combined under the name Talsi History and Art Museum and installed in Kaijgar's home. The collection was rebuilt slowly, under the obligatory ideological banners of the Soviet era, by directors Janis Znotins (1949-1960) and especially Anna Rasa (1968-1994), whose ethnographic expeditions through Talsi-area villages and large-scale art days from 1983 to 1989 made the museum a genuine cultural center even within Soviet constraints.

On 21 December 1996, with Latvia restored to independence and the Fircks villa restored to its original purpose, the Talsi Regional Museum returned to the historic premises on K. Milenbach 19, where its first iteration had begun seventy-three years earlier. Mirdza Jonele, museum director since 1994, oversaw the move. Today exhibitions and expositions occupy three floors of Villa Hochheim, with two new exhibitions opening every month. The Talsi Dendrological Park, descended from the baron's imported tree nurseries, still surrounds the building. The hill, the trees, the building, and the institution have all changed hands repeatedly across 130 years, but they have stayed in conversation with each other, which is more than most aristocratic ambitions ever manage.