Somewhere between a curiosity cabinet and a rolling wonderland, the Office of Collecting and Design has pulled into Chandler — and it arrived on wheels. For a limited time, visitors can step inside a converted 42-foot RV trailer and explore hundreds of drawers filled with the kinds of small, overlooked objects most people walk right past.
The museum is the creation of Jessica Oreck, an artist and filmmaker who says her passion for collecting started before she could even speak. As her parents tell it, she was already gathering tiny bits of dust and insect eggs as a toddler. That lifelong instinct eventually became something much bigger.
“I’ve always been drawn to the things that people don’t necessarily look at, but then when you put them together in bulk, they have their own charm. They have their own magic.”
The trailer’s interior feels like stepping into another world. A dark blue ceiling dotted with gold stars stretches overhead, and an ornate lamp hangs at its center. Sage green walls rise on either side, lined floor to ceiling with more than 300 drawers — toolboxes, printers’ drawers, flat file cabinets, and even a row of miniature drawer sets arranged along a flat archway. Underfoot, colorful floral rugs are scattered across wood-paneled floors, giving the space a cozy, lived-in warmth that feels anything but institutional.
The Office of Collecting and Design began as a practical solution. Oreck needed somewhere to store the props she used for her stop-motion animation work. But her instinct for aesthetics transformed a simple storage space into something people wanted to experience.
“Because I am who I am, I built it out very thoroughly and aesthetically. And my friends and family were like, ‘You know, you should really open this to the public.'”
She did exactly that, opening the space for public visits during limited hours at an ordinary Las Vegas strip mall. The response was overwhelming enough that Oreck eventually set her filmmaking career aside entirely.
“Now I no longer have time to animate. I only do the museum.”
Life on the Road
Taking the museum on the road felt like a natural next step — and, for Oreck, a deeply personal one. She purchased an old RV and rebuilt it from the ground up to house her traveling collection.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a long-haul trucker. And so this felt like the perfect combination of things. I get to be, um, you know, spreading this museum, doing this thing that I love, and also get to be on the road all the time.”
Visitors are not just welcome to look — they are actively encouraged to open every drawer and handle what’s inside. The collection spans an almost dizzying range of small objects: used pink erasers, miniature food items like tiny candy canes and hot dogs, teddy bear and doll eyeballs (plus one real glass eye), and a set of tiny chairs. Large glass jars sit on a central island holding lost buttons, handmade paper confetti from a piñata shop in Mexico, marbles, giant pencils, hand-carved alphabet letters, and an assortment of matches — each one a slightly different shade, together forming a full rainbow.
Oreck has a particular fondness for one collection she started at age 11: imperfect, unplayable dice. She has somewhere between 15 and 25 drawers of them, ranging from mass-produced pieces with misaligned pips to handmade examples carved from cow bone in the late 1800s.
“If the place was on fire and I could save one collection, I’m probably save the dice.”
She describes what draws her to the objects she collects as something almost tactile and emotional.
“There’s a residue of attention, like some of these things were very well-loved, and you can feel that when you hold an object. And that’s that’s a pretty critical part of it to me.”
The Stories Behind the Objects
Some of the most compelling items in the museum carry histories attached to real people. A small wooden case holds a dozen faces carved from tagua nut — each small enough to sit in the palm of your hand — alongside a few black-and-white photographs. Oreck found them at an antique shop in upstate New York, where the elderly owners interrupted their supper to let her browse.
“Iris, the woman that ran the antique shop, said, ‘Oh my gosh, our friend Art Koch carved those. He was film-star handsome. Let me see if I can dig up some pictures.'”
Those photographs now travel with the carvings. Art Koch, she learned, was a World War II veteran who returned home safely and spent his later years creating the delicate pieces.
“He died, but now I have them here in the museum, and I love that I get to sort of carry on his legacy.”
Then there is the chewing gum collection — several drawers of foreign gum from around the world — which began with a relationship and ended with an unexpected return shipment.
“I dated a a rodeo star who was addicted to chewing gum, like would put in a piece of gum very first thing in the morning before he turned on the light. We stayed friends for a long time, and so for years, I would send him chewing gum from everywhere I visited in the world. And, um, yeah, at some point he got married, and his wife was like, ‘Who is this woman that’s sending you chewing gum?’ And so he sent me all the chewing gum back.”
The Office of Collecting and Design is currently making its way through the Southwest on its fall tour, with stops in Chandler and Tucson. The Show on KJZZ has been covering the museum as part of its ongoing Collections series, devoted to the things people acquire and treasure.
