Cabinets of Curiosity

Decorative features in our renovated Library here at Teindside include our collection of taxidermy, and, what I call my ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’. These, in our case, are book and display cases, containing my personal collection of specimens found in nature and from times past. I guess they’re not everyone’s cup of tea and I can see why they can be an acquired taste in ones front room, but they do fit-in with the design aesthetic we are using here which is all about bringing the house back to its hey-day, at the end of the nineteenth century.

‘Cabinets of Curiosity’ were re-popularised in late Georgian and Victorian times, but actually their history is much older. Kunstkammer, or Wonder-Rooms, existed in the houses of aristocrats and wealthy European merchants from as early as the late sixteenth century. Historically the term ‘cabinet’ referred to an entire room, rather than a piece of furniture and the collections contained within were vast and encyclopaedic, demonstrating the personal interests of the owner, and often including what we now broadly describe as the study of natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious relics and antiquities. These vast personal collections formed the precursor of museums which of course were latterly designed to be open to the public. One of the most well-known collectors, Sir Hans Sloan (1660-1753), founded the British Museum and was the person to whom Sloan Square is attributed. He spent many years collecting and cataloguing a vast array of items including over eight hundred species of plant.

The enjoyment I get from collecting found items from nature was developed in me as a small child. My favourite time of year then, was autumn, because at primary school that was the time we went out for walks, as lines of little children along the hedgerows to collect rosehips, beech nuts, acorns, conkers and colourful leaves to bring back to the ‘nature table’ in our classroom. We would then go on to mono-print with them or make colourful collages for the wall. I continued this tradition with my own daughter, setting up our own nature table at home in our kitchen much to the irritation of my then husband, who insisted the habit brought in spiders! On holidays at my parent’s house on the Ardnamurchan peninsular in the Scottish Highlands, we collected shells; cowrie, cockle, clam and oyster, perfectly formed and washed by white shell-sands on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Back home in the Yorkshire Wolds, on countryside walks I began to collect little animal and bird skulls, so delicate and sculptural. These would be accompanied by beautiful feathers, discarded bird’s eggs and even the storm-blown nests they were found in, natures miraculous architecture! Then there were the Victorian glass bottle tops and marbles dug up in the garden along with a flint arrowhead discovered by my mother and a seventeenth century jerkin button found by my five-year-old daughter on the path to Castle Tioram.

As a newly qualified art and design lecturer I began to bring some of this developing collection of nature’s Objet d'art into college for students to draw and use as inspiration for developing print designs destined for their wallpaper and fabric collections. And by the time I was in my forties, my collection of curiosities boasted weird and wonderful items including a complete badger’s skull, the shed skin of a slow worm and my pride and joy, the entire outer skin of a Pipefish, cousin to a Seahorse, found in the sand at the tideline on the Solway coast. I have also received gifts, a giant clam shell from the Norwegian arctic circle and an antique Jackle’s skull, given as a valentine by guess who!     

The Victorians took private collecting to their hearts designing pieces of furniture specifically for the job and eventually integrating these pieces into their libraries, the name given to the room we might call our modern-day Study. This is what we have attempted to recreate in the largest of our ground-floor reception rooms. The room is painted Smoke Green, which is almost a perfect match for the remnants of paint we found ingrained in the lime plaster. We have installed a reclaimed, turn of the century Mahogony chimney piece with an Arts & Crafts fender and reclaimed tiled hearth and we have furnished the room with antique bookcases, an old olive-yellow chesterfield and eighteenth-century Gainsborough armchairs in their original condition. Our taxidermy and my collection of curiosities complete, what we think is a nod to what might have been before.

I’d love to hear about your collections, what they are and perhaps how you’ve incorporated them into an interior scheme in your own home. It is personal things like this that bring a home to life and make it yours and nobody else’s.