As you can imagine, there’s testosterone in heaps around here. So there’s bound to be evidence of that on the inside of our house in fair doses. My feeling is: include it in the interior design. Come up with a way to make it work. (Speaking of, you should see the messy trail of my thought process as I’ve been working on making camouflage, football, and guitars work together in the same loft space for three boys. Oy.)
So, antlers, anyone? When I came across the above image way back when, I knew I had to save it. It was inspiration for making taxidermy work in an tasteful way, giving the room the feel of a naturalists’ abode instead of a hunter’s trophy room.
With our family, I knew there was bound to be antlers involved in the interior, most likely from wild game, as we are a family who hunts to harvest a portion of our natural meat from the mountains surrounding us. We aren’t out to gather a collection of trophies, however. Instead, we enjoy the experience of the wilderness and the opportunity to practice environmental stewardship and responsible wild game management. But, sometimes the trophy just happens to walk out of a thicket and into view. This whitetail buck mount is, for us, a memento of a boy’s first hunt, his first provision for the family table.
And so it has a place.
