Taxidermy for City Dwellers
Homeowners Try Amadillos, Elk To Warm Up Modern Spaces; Bergdorf's Ostrich, $19,500
By TROY MCMULLEN, Wall Street Journal
May 5, 2006; Page W1
Taxidermy, long confined to log cabins, lodges and trophy rooms, is coming to life in some unusual places.
Aiming to help homeowners who want to add warmth to their modern and often-cold interiors, retailers and urban decorators are pushing an unusual solution: stuffed, dead animals. Over the past year, boutiques and high-end department stores have begun adding everything from $450 deer heads to $25,000 zebras. Taxidermy shops report they're selling more pieces to people other than those who shot them. Many members of the new taxidermy class have never picked up a rifle, and are, in some cases, vegetarians.
Since last fall, when Parisian taxidermist Deyrolle teamed up with New York department store Bergdorf Goodman, the store has sold pieces including a $19,500 ostrich. (Offerings on the store's housewares floor also include a $795 black crow and a goose for $2,595.) Deyrolle has also made deals to sell its wares at stationery boutique Caspari in Charlottesville, Va., and French Look International, a home furnishings importer in Chicago. Later this year, Barneys New York will introduce a line of mounted birds -- from $700 exotic finches to $3,400 peacocks -- in its Manhattan store.
Traditional taxidermy shops say they're seeing more interior decorators buying deer and elk mounts. At Adirondacks Reflections in Keene, N.Y., owner Bud Piserchia says he has nearly doubled his staff to 11 from six over the past two years to keep up with demand. There's at least a six-month wait for 12-point buck mounts at Animal Artistry in Reno, Nev. "They fly in here from San Francisco or Seattle to get these things," says Stuart Farnsworth, the store's general manager. "A few years ago, we couldn't give that stuff away."
Cindy Gallop recently looked to the animal kingdom to accessorize her Manhattan apartment, to go with modern furnishings such as a sleek, Italian-made sofa and a 6-foot-long midcentury shaved walnut coffee table. Though the 45-year-old former advertising executive doesn't hunt, she accented her living room with a black bearskin floor rug -- head included -- and a stuffed armadillo. (As for the upkeep, she says, she just vacuums them every few months.) In the home's entryway, by a mirror, hang two deer heads. "It gives the apartment a feeling of warmth," she says.
Using taxidermy as home décor picks up on "hunting-lodge chic," a mostly ironic fad that recently appeared in design-oriented hotels and restaurants. (Philippe Starck lined New York's Hudson Hotel with deer antlers several years ago.) That movement soon spilled over to the mass market, with big-box retailers stocking wrought iron antler candleholders and moose silhouette table lamps.
The aesthetic also plays off the art-world niche of avant-garde taxidermy. There's a rising market in works by British artist Damien Hirst, known for animals encased in formaldehyde: His 1995 "Away From the Flock, Divided," featuring the body of a lamb split in half, sold at auction earlier this month for $3.37 million, a record for the artist. Among the latest works from the Japanese conceptual artist and sculptor Kohei Nawa are shoulder-mounted deer heads covered in transparent glass beads. Last month, he sold four at the Armory Show, an international art fair in New York, for $7,000 to $10,000 each, including one to a Miami interior designer. There is now a waiting list for his work.
Taxidermy chic, naturally, has its detractors. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals considers using animals for decoration a dead-end business. "In the cities where department stores sell these macabre adornments," it said in a statement, "it can be all too easy to forget these were living, feeling beings." Architectural Digest magazine says it does not allow taxidermy in any of its photos. "We like our animals alive," says a spokeswoman.
'It Felt Kind of Fake'
There's no telling how long its popularity will last. John Brommel, owner of the Corner Shoppe Mall, a furniture and antiques store in Austin, Texas, thinks the taxidermy trend resembles one that came and went a few years ago for Southwestern-style accents, such as wagon-wheel coffee tables and live cacti. "You can bet that some people will be stuck with dead stuff they don't want," says Mr. Brommel, who stocks about 400 taxidermy items.
Susan Slavit and her husband, Gerry, considered adding taxidermy to their Wellesley, Mass., home last year. They already had deer antlers and a mounted moose in their Maine vacation place -- they've had them for years -- but decided against it in their suburban home. Instead, they went for antique vases and wood-framed mirrors. "We don't hunt, so it felt kind of fake," says Ms. Slavit.
Some hunters scoff at the notion of nonhunters decorating their walls with animal heads. Alan Chopp has about 200 stuffed animals in his Edison, N.J., home, including a desert mule he bagged in Mexico, a rhino he shot in South Africa and a Siberian Roe Deer he killed in Mongolia, all displayed in a trophy room. "I'm not sure it's worth putting the animals up if you didn't hunt them yourself," says the 57-year-old nursing-home-industry compliance officer.
Cynthia Vincent, a fashion designer, fielded some grousing after she added animals to her two-story contemporary Los Angeles home last year. A 4-foot English pheasant stands on her living room coffee table, and two swifts are mounted side by side near a bay window. Her favorite is a free-standing 2-foot-tall partridge on a bookshelf in the home's entryway. More than one friend told her the décor was "a little peculiar," she says. "Some of them thought it was ugly."
Taxidermists do much of their business preserving animals for the people who shot them. If they're selling to outside parties, taxidermists often get the hides from hunters -- either bought outright or on consignment -- or from fur distributors, who typically work with trappers or fur farmers and can sell the animals they don't use. Many states forbid killing animals for the purpose of stuffing and selling. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says there are no national laws or licensing requirements for the profession. The field is becoming more popular: The National Taxidermists Association says membership is up about 40% since 2002.
Write to Troy McMullen at troy.mcmullen@wsj.com
Housewares Hunting
As taxidermy becomes more popular, a number of home furnishings designers have added animal themes lately.
