GO TO YOUR VERY WEIRD ROOM!

Mal and Sandra Sharpe--he’s a radio show host and she’s a playwright--were so inspired by a friend’s eccentrically decorated house that they decided to document the idiosyncratic in home decoration. Working with photographer Alexander Vertikoff, they produced “Weird Rooms,” which will be published Nov. 1 by Pomegranate Artbooks. “We were looking for rooms that have broken through a limited way of seeing,” say the Sharpes. “People often asked us what we meant by a ‘weird room.’ All we could say was that when you walk in, you whisper to yourself, ‘Wow. This is a weird room.’ Many of these rooms were not very far from our house in Berkeley. Maybe California is just a strange place, or maybe if you, dear reader, were to thoroughly investigate your own placid neighborhood, you would find some weird rooms too.”

THE MONSTER ROOM

My dad is an art director for movies. A long time ago he made a bunch of monster movies, and they let him keep the monsters. We have a monster room just outside my house, on the other side of the patio. It’s my playroom, and my friends think it’s neat. The big ol’ wolf is my favorite ‘cause he’s cool and you can make his legs move with a little cup on the back. My second favorite is the severed head; the mouth is open and he’s screaming. I never come out here in the dark. I always keep the lights on.

Hunter Sandell

THE GROTTO

A couple of years after buying my house I discovered a half-domed cave on the property. My wife jokingly suggested that I turn it into a grotto. I started filling it with little figures of baby Jesus. My brother gave me 80 abalone shells. I nailed them around the entrance. Now I’ve got 900 shells and 400 religious statues. When I have the candles lit and I sit here with a glass of grappa, it’s a serene escape from reality. When you’ve taught high school for 25 years, you need to get away from it all

Arne Ghigliazza

DIZ’S PLACE

The good thing about my bedroom is that it’s really dark in here. I have gels covering the windows--red, pink, blue. They come from movie sets I’ve worked on. I never know what time it is or whether it’s rainy or sunny. I have thousands of pictures stapled to the walls. It started with one photo of Robert De Niro, then it spread. One wall is a celebrity wall, and another is a fashion wall. I subscribe to nine magazines and each month I cut out hundreds of new pictures and staple them to the ceiling.

Diz McNally

KEN’S SPACESHIP

Everything you see in here I built. The walls and cabinets are made out of 4,000 rolls of gray duct tape. I used thousands of pounds of tinfoil. I have 61 television sets and 23 computers. Wiring runs all through the ceiling. I don’t drive so I carried everything over here from a store. If you look out the window from here, all you see are buildings and cars--very few natural areas where I can go to escape. This is my oasis in the brutal, hostile city.

Ken Irwin

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Text and photographs excerpted from “Weird Rooms,” by Alexander Vertikoff and Mal and Sandra Sharpe