Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 10

Today his Mini Bottle Gallery, located in downtown Oslo, is one of the world’s top unique museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to store his collection, the gallery, which has a restaurant, is also a popular venue for private events.

It was here, while in Oslo for a conference dinner that included a tour of the Mini Bottle Gallery, that I got my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story.

I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.

Christian Ringnes, Founder, The Mini Bottle Gallery

The museum lived up to its quirky reputation.

The entrance is a bottle-shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you move through over 50 unique installations spanning three floors, each features its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting, and even some unique smells. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery are carefully curated.

The mini bottles are grouped into themes ranging from a brothel-inspired Room of Sin with mini bottles from De Wallen (Amsterdam’s red-light district), to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects such as mice and worms floating inside.

There’s a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers, and the occult. There’s even a room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.

Across all these rooms, the tour mentions that the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display. Apart from the scope of the themed rooms, one of the most interesting elements of this story is what the gallery does with the bottles that aren’t on display.