A Fascination With The Macabre

Would you decorate your home with human bones and old medical instruments? Plenty do, according to one Dorset couple, which piqued Faith Eckersall’s morbid curiosity

- Faith Eckersall

 WHEN you’ve spent your childhood being driven round the USA in a 1950s hearse by your dad, it’s bound to have some effect.

For Starla Rose, the effect was simple: “I developed a real fascination with the macabre.”

A trained theatrical wig-maker and professional model, Starla and her partner, Mattaeus Ball, who live in Bournemouth, run an entire website devoted to the sale of all things odd: last-century anatomical illustrations, Victorian mourning jewellery, old medical implements and glass syringes, and human bones fashioned into tasteful artworks.

“We have always been drawn to the macabre ourselves; artwork, literature, movies, the whole genre, really,” explains Starla. “Originally, we ran a photography business but it just wasn’t meeting our expectations, so we started wondering what else we could do which would be enjoyable.”

They had noticed press reports about celebrities such as Kat Von D, the television personality and tattoo artist who collected ethical taxidermy. The couple had for some time been collecting the unusual themselves such as old poison bottles, mourning jewellery and other oddities. It was this, says Starla, which inspired their extraordinary business. “We looked at our collection and thought why don’t we sell the things we love and see if other people love them too?”

Their hunch proved right. The couple opened a store Memento Mori featuring their strange cabinet of curiosities in Westbourne, just a few hundred yards from where writer Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the ‘fine, bogey tale’ that inspired his book The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Mattaeus and Starla installed a human skeleton under the glass counter and started retailing everything from an executioner’s axe to tiaras made from the bones of dead rats.