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Meet Ryan and Lisa Moulton of The Room Of Lost Things in Santa Fe Art District

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan and Lisa Moulton.

Ryan and Lisa, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
The Room Of Lost Things was an accidental success! The very beginnings of it started when Ryan was pursuing Art Direction in film school in 2010-2011. The school didn’t offer classes for that specific profession, so she was encouraged to get hands-on experience by joining other students’ and professionals’ film projects to focus on production design.

She was eventually deemed Art Director on a short film with a decent budget, which required her to create props in a collaboration between Native American culture and supernatural magic. Many of the props required her to put her creativity to work and made many of them out of found materials. Because they didn’t want someone with little experience to be in charge of the prop/costume budget, they sent her to shadow the Art Department of the 4th Season of the TV show, “Breaking Bad” in hopes to gain her some experience in finding/creating the elements of production design on a strict budget.

The end result left her with ownership of the props after the film was completed (as she found/created them herself at no cost), and many of them were fun, magical looking walking sticks with feathers, leather and beads adorning them. She sold them for a larger-than-expected profit after the film came to an end, and was asked to make more to sell with the addition of custom animal claws & teeth on the pieces for a larger profit.

After that, she began her intrigue and interest in bone cleaning & taxidermy and learned by teaching herself how to do it via YouTube.

Ryan: “It was a nice side hobby for some extra cash, and I began making bone jewelry & preserving naturally deceased animals for fun. I got most of my materials from salvageable roadkill and local pet shop/reptile shops’ natural losses.

At the time, I worked at The Wizard’s Chest and would fantasize about owning my own weird little shop selling all of the world’s most bizarre and magical things. I even made a “dream list” of inventory I would sell/create, jotting down ideas during slow times. Lisa framed and displayed that scratchy dream list in the shop after she discovered it amongst my stuff when we moved in together.

The owner of The Wizard’s Chest, Kevin Pohle, is an awesome guy and has been known for helping young adults grow and eventually chase their dreams, using The Wizard’s Chest as a safe space to work while you express, explore, and figure out who you are. He began encouraging me on my own path by allowing me to sell some of my creations while I was working there, and even for a little while after I left.

The part that set off the ultimate road to the creation of The Room Of Lost Things was when I met Lisa. We started dating after she graduated with her bachelor’s degree at CSU. There were some fun adventures we had where I taught her how to skin and process dead animals & remains. She loved it as much as I did! We were both struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage jobs, so we stepped up the side hobby of selling bones, wet specimens and oddities on Craigslist and in a small rented space during First Friday Art Walk on Santa Fe Dr. every month in Denver.

From that moment, the First Friday Art Walk got us booming, with demand for more and more every month, and every year since. The Santa Fe Art District in Denver is an amazingly colorful collaboration between artists from all backgrounds, and Denver’s community support of small business and local artists.

We became an actual storefront after stumbling into the quirky and chic antique/vintage shop, “Ninni & Foffa’s” — now the next-door neighbor and sister store to The Room Of Lost Things.

I walked in, amazed by all of the old and fun decors they have, and had to ask, “Do you by chance have anything we could display a horse fetus in?” It was a deep and fun-loving friendship from there on out. Edie, one of the owners of Ninni & Foffa’s, was thrilled by the absurdity of the challenge to help me find a vessel for my horse fetus and invited me into the basement of her shop to scavenge through her back stock for a potential fit.

At some point after that, we began sharing glasses of wine, stories, struggles, and successes. When the space next door to them became available, they snagged it and asked if we would be their sister store. We helped them gain some extra traffic, and they helped us learn & grow into the business we are now. We couldn’t have made it this far without them and everything they have done for us.”

Lisa: “We started small not knowing it would develop into anything large. We didn’t know what we had and how popular it would become. We we’re just trying to make ends meet, and this was a fun side thing at first.

When I got out of college, I really had no idea what I was going to do for a living, so I had a clean slate, so-to-speak. When the oddities thing we were doing started booming, Ryan asked me to quit my minimum wage job to help her create more things to sell. It’s been one hell of a ride. The adventures have been limitless. I would have never expected to have such a beautiful career, where we get to make magic out of things that would otherwise be discarded.”

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has most definitely not been a smooth road. Owning a business never is! We’ve had to learn many things the hard way. Everything from the business end of things, taxidermy/wildlife laws, to how to best preserve specimens that are retail and consumer worthy. You have to have it in you to pull up your bootstraps in gross situations you’d never have predicted you’d find yourself in; Like when a freezer accidentally shorts out and you have a whole chest full of rotting carcasses. Or when you accidentally spill over a thousand flesh-eating beetles all over the floor. Creating a clean product like we do is definitely not for the faint-hearted.

One of the hardest things, in the beginning, was trying to keep up with a steady flow of inventory because of how popular our shop became so rapidly. We had to take on many consignors at first to keep the shelves stocked. It’s nice to say that we’ve finally built a system of ethical sources, and have been able to slowly afford a wider variety of inventory to keep the shop regularly fun and interesting.

Please tell us about The Room Of Lost Things.
We specialize in “oddities and curiosities,” and have been asked more than once before what the word “oddity” means to us. We believe that entails anything that evokes a sense of wonder. That can range from anything like doll heads sporting live plants as hair to different varieties of fetuses in jars. We take a lot of pride in the presentation of the items in our shop, elaborating on a beautiful balance between life and death. Many people assume we’re obsessed with death — however, it’s quite the opposite. We love the beauty of life and how it’s made, how it grows, and how it evolves. Everything that leaves our shop has a new life of its own.

Another piece of pride we hold is that we have a semi-large vegan following. People know we take natural death and preserve it. We carry a very small amount of inventory that had been previously legally hunted, but our main source is from the ebb and flow of natural life and death. We use every part of a creature we can preserve, and we are making a comeback at the old world.

Our niche is the authenticity of the gifts and decor we provide. No other place in Denver that we know of sells the type of hands-on pieces of actual nature we have available. We’re often a one-stop-shop for tourists visiting Denver from all over the world and have been confused for a museum more times than we can count. The story behind the treasure, how we made or procured it, and where it came from matters to us the most. One of our personal favorite things to do is share our personal knowledge of the different must-see quirky places around our hearty little-big city you won’t see in a regular tourism magazine.

What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to or planning for – any big changes?
We’ve got some big plans! We’re currently in the process of writing and creating a TV show based in the shop. It’s a side project we’re having fun with and taking lightly. We’re also expanding a bit more this year and adding another portion of square footage to our space.

We’re looking forward to creating a platform to provide online sales this year, finally! We’ve gone against the usual current and have become successful FIRST as a tangible, in-person store before the internet sales hit our radar despite advice we were given by our “square” business peers (we’ve since surprised them by our success). We’re excited to be able to provide multiple avenues for purchase to those interested in what we have in the shop.

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Image Credit:
John Mauser: photo of our storefront

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