HOUSE OF WUNDER

Built in 1800s

Ryan Matthew Cohn’s fascination with the Wunderkammer began in his childhood, when he started collecting natural elements and integrating them into his early artworks. Over time, his interest expanded to antiques, merging with his passion for nature to shape the foundation of his artistic practice. This love of collecting evolved into House of Wunder, his home and lifelong masterpiece, where each object—from rare anatomical specimens to esoteric artifacts—forms a cohesive expression of the Wunderkammer ethos. The collection, carefully curated and displayed, reflects Cohn’s dedication to exploring curiosity, history, and wonder through his art.

All photos by Pieter Estersohn for The Magazine Antiques.

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A Second Empire vitrine holding fossils, pieces of coral, and a shell is flanked by gilded eighteenth-century Italian putti grotesques with faces in their stomachs.
The Cohns call this space their “reading room” because it contains their collection of rare books and manuscripts, which date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries and cover topics including natural history, human anatomy, and the occult.
In the “formal room,” as the Cohns call it, a nineteenth-century Austrian lusterweibchen chandelier—a traditional regional form that incorporates a carved wooden female figure (here, a mermaid) and elk or deer antlers—hangs above a Louis XV–style des
The framed length of braided hair in the upstairs library is a nineteenth-century memento mori.
An Eastlake-style display cabinet in one corner of the formal room holds a collection of skulls and other osteological specimens. The nineteenth-century terracotta statue of a woman holding a theatrical mask may represent Melpomene, the muse of trage
The stairwell wall is hung salon style with a mix of nineteenth-century portraits and religious artifacts and paintings.
A no-longer-functioning nineteenth-century Black Forest clock with a blinking-eye escapement.
The upstairs library has a display case filled with skulls, masks, and other head-related artifacts, as well as two life-sized lay figures, or artist’s mannequins: a wooden nineteenth-century example at left; and an eighteenth-century French papier-m
A bronze Apollo of c. 1871 by Mathurin Moreau (1822–1912) stands atop an eighteenth-century Spanish vargueno, or portable desk.
A decorative suit of armor from the nineteenth century is surrounded by wooden war clubs and other weapons, most from South America.
The central room on the ground floor contains a mix of natural and religious artifacts as well as eccentric furnishings such as, at left, an intricately carved nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian table in the style known as “Bombay blackwood” and an ear
The marble bust of a veiled woman is identical to a c. 1895 sculpture by Emilio Fiaschi (1858–1941) in the collection of the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida.
Atop a built-in platform in a room on the top floor stands a nineteenth-century cast-iron bed once owned by Andy Warhol and a variety of religious artifacts. The platform is faced with paneling salvaged from a church in Newark, New Jersey, that was d
This group of antique hand-shaped artifacts includes two reliquaries, at left, and a curious wax hand with lips.
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