Cabinets of Curiosities: The Original Vintage Collection
Ole Worm had a problem most of us would envy. By the 1640s, his Copenhagen home had run out of walls.
The Danish physician and scholar had spent two decades gathering objects from across the known world — coral and fossils, narwhal tusks, exotic weapons, clockwork instruments, ethnographic pieces brought back through the expanding trade routes of the era — and every surface was covered. Shelves, walls, even the ceiling. Guests travelled from across Europe, and occasionally royalty, specifically to stand in that room and wonder at it. Ole Worm had built what we now call a Cabinet of Curiosities, and he'd built one of the finest ever recorded.
Photo by @belle-brocante || Instagram
What a Cabinet of Curiosities actually was
The Cabinet of Curiosities — or Wunderkammer, meaning wonder-room in German — was a private collection of unusual objects that flourished across Europe from roughly the 1550s to the 1750s. Despite the name, a cabinet originally referred to an entire room rather than a piece of furniture, and these rooms could be genuinely overwhelming in scale and ambition.
A single collection might hold natural specimens alongside man-made artificialia, the scientific alongside the mythological, the local alongside the exotic. Nothing was separated into tidy categories the way a museum would organise it today. Everything sat together, deliberately, because the point was the wonder of it all in one place — the sheer, almost vertiginous variety of the world made visible on a single set of shelves.
Why people made them
Ole Worm began building his collection around 1620, drawing on his own travels and a network of fellow collectors across Europe who traded and gifted him objects over decades. When he died in 1654, his catalogue was published posthumously — a four-part classification system covering minerals, plants, animals, and man-made objects that historians consider a genuinely early move toward the kind of taxonomy we take for granted now. (It was not without its quirks. His catalogue famously classified mummies as minerals.)
But the motivations behind collections like his went beyond science. Owning rare and exotic objects signalled wealth, curiosity, and access to a wider world most people would never see. There was genuine intellectual ambition in the attempt to make sense of the natural world through accumulation and observation. And there was something more personal, too — a cabinet was something to be shown. Guests were walked through it, objects were discussed, stories were told about where each piece came from. It was, in a very real sense, a room built for conversation.
Image by @paulabertholet || Instagram
Where they went
By the mid-1700s, the cabinet of curiosities largely gave way to something more organised. Natural history became its own discipline. Art collections split off into galleries. Many of Europe's great museums trace their origins directly back to the private cabinets of collectors and monarchs — the impulse did not disappear, it just got sorted into rooms with labels and opening hours.
Australia came to this tradition later and differently. By the time European collecting culture arrived here, the great age of the Wunderkammer had already passed. What took root instead was something quieter — a domestic collecting sensibility, shaped by distance from the source, by the objects that made the long voyage out, and by the particular Australian habit of holding onto things that were well made and worth keeping. The vintage pieces that circulate here today carry that history with them.
Why the idea still matters
There is something worth holding onto in the original version of the cabinet — before it got divided up and made tidy. A Wunderkammer was not trying to be complete, or correct, or even coherent by modern standards. It was personal. It reflected one person's travels, taste, and sense of wonder, gathered under one roof.
That is the spirit behind collecting vintage pieces, too. Every object we source has already had a life — a history, a maker, a home, a use — long before it reaches you. A shelf of vintage vessels gathered slowly, rather than bought as a matching set, tells a story in exactly the way Ole Worm's cabinet did: not through uniformity, but through the particular, sometimes unexpected, always considered choices of the person who put it together.
Displaying a handful of beautiful, mismatched, well-loved pieces on a shelf is, in its own small way, keeping a very old tradition alive.
Below, my own stash of treasures waiting to be allocated a spot in my cabinet of curiosities.
Browse our current collection of vintage vessels and curiosities, and start building a cabinet of your own.