Rosamond Purcell’s full-size re-creation of
17th century naturalist Olaus Worm’s “Wunderkammer”.

The wunderkammer idea came about in a world before museums. Before there were cameras to capture the quirks, strangeness, and charm of the world, people would collect and display natural and manmade oddities in their homes, sometimes devoting entire rooms to their collections. Imagine shells, eggs, taxidermied birds and animals, travel souvenirs, and anything strangely shaped (a vegetable with a face? Yes, please!) arranged in tableaux to underscore their extraordinariness.

~Vogue, October 2005

Not being much of a collector and not having much space to display anything, I’ve never had a wunderkammer aka “room of wonders” or “cabinet of curiosities”. keeps a small shadowbox that could double as a miniature wunderkammer. And my dad loves to collect curios that dangle from ceiling beams and lounge on every flat surface.

…initially, these universes in miniature were private pleasures, invitations to escape, to dream, to reflect on nature and our place in it.

When we finally settle down in our Singapore home, I may start one or two wunderkammers of my own. Perhaps with a window, book, or genetics theme.

“To build a wunderkammer, you need ingenuity, innocence, and eyes that go 360 degrees,” says Kean Etro. …You don’t have to go out and actually scour the globe for reason-challenging bits and pieces.

What kind of wunderkammer would you create?