When Thomas Monauni was four years old, the circus came to Munich.
What caught the young boy’s eye, however, were not the exotic animals, the freak show performers, the fortune tellers, or the burlesque dancers. Instead, he was fascinated by the whale. Stuffed and mounted atop a flatbed trailer, the creature rolled through the crowds of onlookers, a visitor from some alien world. “When you’re a kid, things are larger than life, and they really impact you,” says Monauni. “That was my first exposure to a world you don’t see every day.”
We are sitting in the middle of Wunderkammer, Monauni’s “chamber of wonders,” located in the CRAFTED warehouses in San Pedro. It is equal parts antique store and art gallery, where everything is for sale, but where, Monauni hopes, visitors will experience more than the thrill of mere commerce.
Retro-futuristic, polished aluminum cars by Los Angeles builder Baron Margo occupy a corner across from a life-sized Frankenstein figure and within sight of 500-year-old Christian relics. Down the way sits work by special effects artist Norman Cabrera and a display of Bone Clones skulls, including an 8.5-foot-tall megalodon shark jaw.
Born in Northern Italy to German parents, Monauni grew up in Munich before finding his way to Los Angeles in the 1980s to work in film as a production designer, helping directors create entire worlds on-screen. It was exciting work for a kid who grew up obsessed with films like Jason and the Argonauts and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “In my work, I was always chasing the Argonauts and 20,000 Leagues and Godzilla,” he says. “This was larger than life for me. It was crazy good.”
The work was also exhausting. Having fallen in love with San Pedro during film productions here, Monauni made it his home. “I needed time away where I could be quiet and plan the sets,” he recalls. “I lived on a boat in Cabrillo Marina. My only friend at the time was a seal. He came up to me. I called him Heinrich. His tail had been caught in a propeller and was damaged, and he was really cool. We just had this moment in that time of my life.”
What drew Monauni to San Pedro wasn’t just the quiet marina. “I love San Pedro,” he says. “Whenever I come over the Vincent Thomas Bridge and look down, it’s so much Europe. It’s a port town. It’s not a beach town.” He appreciates the cultural history, the working-class character, the way it feels separate from the rest of Los Angeles. For someone who grew up in Munich and spent years creating fictional worlds, San Pedro offered something rare: a real place with its own distinct character.
Monauni also fell in love with the derelict World War II-era warehouses where Wunderkammer now resides. He had been noodling with the idea for his chamber of wonders but never imagined it living in those crumbling harbor buildings. Then CRAFTED opened. After some time in an antique mall, Monauni, along with the help of his son Michael, moved into CRAFTED in 2024. He’s been building his vision ever since. Now home to approximately 30 different vendors and artists, Wunderkammer offers an escape from the online world of pixels and infinite reproducibility.
In an era when most shopping happens through screens, Monauni believes something essential gets lost in translation. “All this stuff is here, and you can look at it and you can touch it and you can feel it,” he says, gesturing around the warehouse. “It’s tangible.” He compares it to travel: looking at a postcard of New York versus actually standing in the city. “Until you go there, you don’t know what New York really is.”
When children approach the Bone Clones megalodon shark jaw, their imaginations ignite differently than they do when scrolling past an image online. “They see this megalodon jaw of this giant shark with these giant teeth, and their imagination has to put this in context,” he explains. “We sometimes have kids that draw a megalodon shark… they have their fantasy, their creativity about it.”
It’s not just children reconnecting with wonder. Monauni points to Malice Mcmunn’s “Malice’s Wunderland” section, featuring 1980s VHS tapes and a period-accurate living room. “I see the younger people who are in their late teens and how they embrace this analog media,” he says. “It’s so amazing to see, because they are interested in what you went through at a certain time, too.”
But Wunderkammer’s future in San Pedro isn’t certain. The venture is only nine months old in its current form, and Monauni estimates they’re about 60 percent complete. When Brouwerij West, a neighboring brewery and tasting room that drew significant foot traffic, closed, the impact was immediate. “The visitor number here now is a little bit less than it was before, and it made it much tougher,” he admits.
Ongoing construction on the Vincent Thomas Bridge threatens to disrupt access further. “In the end, it will be positive, but in the short term, it could be devastating to the businesses,” Monauni says, his usual enthusiasm tempered by practical concern.
There’s a vulnerability in how he talks about San Pedro. “Pedro is the perfect home for Wunderkammer, and I hope that Pedro embraces it,” he says. Then, more softly: “So far, it’s good.”
Monauni sits surrounded by objects that have outlived their original owners. The ancient religious relics, the skeletons of extinct animals, even the Aurora model kit mummy is a replica of something ancient filtered through 1970s pop culture nostalgia. All of it will be here long after he’s gone.
“We are only custodians of things anyway,” he reflects. “We are mortal, and we will go away one day, and then somebody else will become the custodian. But being a custodian of it is sometimes a wonderful thing to do.”
It’s a surprisingly modest philosophy from someone who spent decades creating worlds that only existed on screen. Now, he curates the actual, the historical, the real, even when that reality includes a life-sized Frankenstein monster and retro-futuristic aluminum cars. The eclectic whimsy is deliberate. “My head looks like this,” he says, laughing and gesturing broadly. “I have these different kinds of rooms and different squirrels in my head that go there, go there, go there.”
That mental architecture—part circus, part museum, part fever dream—manifests physically in Wunderkammer’s layout. Each of the 30 Wunderkammer merchants brings their own aesthetic, their own obsessions. “They all have their own fantasy,” Monauni explains. “And it morphs together like a patchwork of a quilt.”
What he ultimately hopes it shows is possibility. “You never know when a kid goes through here who has the talent to be a sculptor, to be a writer, to be a photographer,” he says. “And maybe there’s something in here that sparks.” He pauses, then adds, “Kids have a great imagination. We should never, ever let that go. That’s the most important thing. We can’t lose imagination.”
When asked what he wants visitors to experience, Monauni’s answer is one of openness: “I hope they feel something, but I don’t tell them what to feel.” What matters is the feeling itself: curiosity, recognition, wonder, even discomfort. “To explore the human experience without a filter,” he says.
The whale that rolled through Munich all those years ago was mounted, preserved, dead, but real enough to mark a boy for life. That’s what brings people to Wunderkammer: not just objects, but the experience of encountering them. And these visitors come in every weekend, not just to buy but to talk, to spend time, to share a moment. “I don’t see them that much as customers,” Monauni says. “They’re kind of spending time with me, and that’s a huge value.” In a world of frictionless online transactions, Monauni is betting that this experience—human-to-human, object-to-person—still matters. spt
Wunderkammer at the Port of Los Angeles is located at 112 E. 22nd Street, next door to CRAFTED. For more information, visit their Instagram @wunderkammerstore.
Share Your Comments