Our Story

The Terrorium Shop is Colorado’s oldest oddity shop. What started out as a collaboration between Ian and Amber, a taxidermist and gardener, blossomed into a growing team of preservationists.

It all started with a curious little girl and a strange secret hobby. When Amber was little she would collect found curiosities. Everything from tiny vibrant flowers, beautiful butterflies and fragmented bones. When she got older she began experimenting with recreating these curiosities environments.

A few moons back Amber met Ian, a lover of preservation also.  For their first holiday together Amber gifted Ian one of her creations and that’s when The Terrorium Shop was born. 

Amber and Ian combined their interest in preservation and their different skill sets to create unique pieces showcasing the processes of decay and regrowth; death and life. From 2017-2018 Amber and Ian shared their love of nature and preservation with the local community through craft markets. In May, 2019, the odd couple opened their first store, a quaint little brick and mortar tucked away in the Berkeley neighborhood of Denver. 

Today The Terrorium Shop team has blossomed into their second location featuring a separate classroom space down the street. What started as 2 artists now consists of a growing talented team all specializing in different areas of preservation and art. The Terrorium Shop hand makes a large number of their products from start to finish. Processing bones with their dermestid beetle colony, pinning and mounting their own insect specimens, creating wet specimens, creating diaphonizations and preserving their own floral. The Terrorium Shop also provides a variety of beautifully preserved materials at their brick and mortar store for others to make their own art pieces and even teach classes on a variety of subjects like taxidermy, entomology, botany and more. Because art is about community 💕