An Afternoon Inside the World’s Only Bunny Museum

A bunny statue.

​The Bunny Museum doesn't really look like a museum. It's a one-story Spanish-style house like all the others in its quiet Pasadena, California, neighborhood—it just happens to have over 30,000 pieces of bunny paraphernalia stuffed inside of it.
Spouses Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski live there too, surrounded by what became, almost accidentally, their life's work. Steve gave Candace a stuffed bunny for Valentine's Day in 1993, they started trading bunny gifts on holidays, then they began exchanging bunnies even on regular days, and by 1998 they had so many objets d'bunny that they opened their home to the public and called it a museum.

Candace, who styles her long platinum-blonde hair in carefully messy waves and cakes her face with makeup and glitter, looks like a bohemian Dolly Parton and exudes a vivacious energy. This is a woman who follows her passions: She's also an angel expert, she dresses from head to toe in red every day (she finds the color best represents her personality), and she wrote and self-published a b​ook called There Is an Answer: Living in the Post-Apocalyptic World, which explains the teachings of Emanuel Swedenb​org, an eccentric 18th-century Swedish mystic. The Bunny Museum, though, is Candace's primary focus, and she looks after it with love and enthusiasm.

Candace Frazee sitting next to her collection's newest addition

When my friend and I pull up to the museum there are two young women, dressed in red like Candace, struggling to carry a large white sculpture out of a U-Haul truck and into the museum. Candace asks us to sign in and wait outside a moment while she helps the girls and the sculpture get settled. I am the museum's 22,256th visitor, I am told by the sign-in sheet.
After a few minutes, Candace comes out and asks for our "bunny money," meaning the $5 admission fee and a bag of vegetables for each of the four real rabbits that live in the museum. She leads us into the entryway, passing a broken arm made of wax lying on the floor and a glass case of freeze-dried bunnies—former pets who have moved on to the great hutch in the sky. She tells me that I'm very lucky to have come today; that sculpture is a new addition to her collection, a piece designed by a French artist named Lucile Littot, who is filming a movie shot in part at the Bunny Museum.

Detail from  Lucile Littot's sculpture

The sculpture turns out to be a glittery saucer the size of an inner tube with a hodgepodge of items stuck onto it: a white dress, white panties, a two-headed taxidermied bunny Lucile bought off eBay. Candace is currently filming a Bunny Museum documentary, so she grabs a camera and films Lucile and me discussing Lucile's film.

Candace then escorts us through a few different rooms jam-packed with stuffed bunnies, porcelain bunnies, piñata bunnies, and so on. She's sweet and the concept comes from a good place, but I can't help but feel a bit anxious wandering around the home, which is insanely cluttered and only marginally cleaner than something you might see on an episode of Hoarders.
She gets distracted with the business of them the new sculpture and tells us to go ahead and "hop around." We wander into a few different rooms, all equally busy with bunny odds and ends. In one room we see a couch and a TV, a reminder that Candace and Steve live here surrounded by all this stuff. Here and there are pieces of stray rabbit poop.
Ah, right, the real bunnies: There are two of them in the pantry closet that doubles as a "bunny den"; a geriatric bunny, blind and incontinent, hiding in the corner of the kitchen; and a four-month-old Flemish G​iant that's supposedly already the size of a small Corgi that we oddly can't find. We stand around awkwardly wondering where Candace went and if our tour is going to resume.
We hear noises outside and find her with the two women loading more bunny sculptures into the shed out back. Candace apologizes and promises to devote more attention to us soon, so we schlep around the backyard. There are bunnies here too, of course: 3D chalk drawings of bunnies line the pavement, an old Rose Bowl float in the shape of a bunny sits idle in the grass, and a short "bunny path" leads to a rock garden in the back that is, obviously, shaped like a bunny.

The Flemish Giant

We finally return inside and sit down with Candace, who tells us about the exhibit she was working toward with Mike​ Kelley, the famous LA artist who was both a fan of the Bunny Museum and an idol of Candace's. Just then the enormous, red-eyed Flemish Giant makes an appearance, and I scan the room wondering where the hell that thing has been hiding. I try to keep my cool as she explains that she had already begun thinking of ideas for the exhibit, such as a trail of real bunny poop that would guide museum visitors around the space. She began collecting her pets' droppings in August 2009, which she keeps in a large mason jar in the same glass case as her dead bunnies. It's those little touches, the planning ahead, that make the Bunny Museum special.