The Unicorn House

Piper Dandy and Josh Shipp’s Memphis home is a pop-culture collector’s paradise.

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The exterior of Piper Dandy and Josh Shipp’s home is unassuming and nondescript. The 3,000-square-foot, mid-century ranch house looks like the other homes in its Whitehaven neighborhood. But as soon as you step beyond the front door, the ordinariness evaporates.

“When someone comes in, like the Comcast guy, they’re always like, ‘Whoa!’” says Shipp. “It gets a reaction every time, because the outside looks so normal.”

The inside is far from normal. Dandy and Shipp are both avid collectors of pop-culture memorabilia, toys, and comics. Every room in their home is designed around their mutual obsession. Some collectors hide their items away in storage units, attics, or garages, waiting patiently for the pieces’ monetary value to appreciate. Dandy and Shipp want to keep their treasures in sight, where they can enjoy them, show them off, and play with them. Even though every available bit of wall and shelf space is filled with action figures, artwork, and toy spaceships, their home still doesn’t contain the full breadth of their collections. This is just the good stuff.

“We keep everything, but we’re not hoarders,” says Dandy. “The garage is full of stuff we want to get rid of!,” says Shipp.

Both say their nerdy obsessions began when they were children, and never really ended. “My parents definitely instigated that,” says Shipp. “They nurtured that side of me. My mom is an artist, so I got a lot of that from her. My dad was a sci-fi nerd.”

Dandy’s father is James “Jim Dandy” Mangrum, the influential, often controversial, lead singer of 1970s hard rockers Black Oak Arkansas. His RIAA-certified gold records now adorn a wall in the living room. “Growing up in the conservative South,” she says, “without the ability to really have friends, because everybody’s like, ‘Her dad’s the devil! Don’t go over to her house!’, you kind of live in your mind. You get a lot of creativity.”

The couple met in 2018 when the tattoo shop where Shipp worked had a comics and toys sale, so naturally, Dandy stopped in. She says the first time she visited Shipp’s apartment, she knew she had found someone special.

“Every place I’ve ever lived in has been like this — Dopamine Decor, 110 percent,” she says. “My dad calls it ‘Piper Dandy’s Playhouse.’ It’s been loud and proud and ready to rock-and-roll the whole time I’ve been able to live on my own. When I first met [Shipp], I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so fancy in here!’ I remember telling my friends, ‘His house is like my house if I had money.’ Everything was professionally framed and super nice. … To me, it’s proof you can have nice things, but also have a personality and not be Crate & Barrel to the max.”

Shipp says he had a similar reaction when he saw Dandy’s domicile. “That’s how it was when I went to her apartment the first time. She had all her stuff framed, and I was used to that part of it. As far as the crazy paint schemes, I had dabbled in that a little bit, with some primary colors in my and my ex-wife’s house, but it was limited to a couple rooms. Everything else was your standard light-gray.”

The Stained Glass Unicorn

Last year, when rising rents in Bartlett forced the couple to rethink their living situation and buy their own house together, they knew the place they settled on was in for a complete, and unique, renovation. They enlisted realtor Luci Gann from The Firm, an old friend of Dandy’s, to help them find a new home.

“We saw a bunch of duds,” Dandy recalls. “Then Luci said, ‘I think you’re going to like this one.’ We came here, and I was like, ‘Search no further! This is our house!’… I love mid-century architecture, first of all, and the slanted windows had me from day one”

But it was another window that sealed the deal. In what is now Dandy’s dressing room, the former owners were leaving behind a stained-glass window depicting a unicorn. “Well, I don’t care if it’s a million dollars,” she told Gann. “This is my house. We’re going to figure it out. Luci fought real hard for us to get this place.”

Then came the real work. The couple did most of the renovation themselves, with a little help from family and friends. “It was a few weeks of getting stuff prepped,” says Shipp. “We took out a lot of linoleum. The kitchen floor took me, my dad, and my brother a week to do. We tried so hard. It had a really cool broken-brick, old-school terracotta vibe to it. But once we pulled it up to restore it, it splintered, because they made the subflooring with particle board, and they had glued and nailed it.”

They sealed the floors they couldn’t save with epoxy and paint. “Epoxy became our best friend,” says Dandy.

The granite countertops didn’t fit the new color scheme, she says, so “I did black epoxy. I got opalescent glitter and blew it from my hand. It spread perfectly. That’s all of our countertops. It came with hideous brown cabinets, so we just went ahead and painted them a monochrome black with everything else. And then I put the Wobble on the top.”

“The Wobble” is what Dandy calls the wavy border between two colors which appears in a few places in the house. In the home’s riot of colors, it serves as a kind of visual signature. “I just did it out of nowhere one day when I decided I didn’t want a harsh line,” she says.

The Wobble finds its ultimate use in Dandy’s brightly colored dressing room, where she used the pattern to suggest a portal opening into her walk-in closet. “I wanted to do something different to the house that was creative, but wasn’t so overdone. So, I didn’t want a normal little rainbow trim, but I also didn’t want a [single] color on the inside of the arch. I was like, I’m just going to obble it, because, you know, how do you mess that up? You don’t.”

The Menagerie

“We’re a house divided,” says Dandy. “I’m Team Trek, and he’s Star Wars.”

“I have pictures of me as a toddler dressed as Luke Skywalker,” says Shipp.

“I love the original [Star Trek] series, of course,” says Dandy. “But Voyager is my shining light.”

“This seems like a good segue into your collecting … uh, problem,” I say.

“Is it a problem, or is it a solution?” says Dandy with a laugh. “I say it’s a solution. It’s my money. I can spend it however I want. I haven’t murdered anyone. It keeps me out of trouble.”

“Credit card companies love us!” says Shipp.

Walking through the house, visitors catch the stern visage of Captain Kirk gazing at them from unexpected angles. Models of the starship Enterprise — big, small, and in-between — are displayed alongside Klingon Vor’Cha class cruisers and Romulan Birds of Prey. A rare Telosian alien from Dandy’s favorite episode, “The Menagerie,” occupies a place of honor in the living room. In Dandy’s workshop, a lenticular print of the Enterprise transporter room makes Kirk and Spock appear and disappear depending on your viewing angle. A vintage Star Trek sleeping bag from the 1960s adorns the wall as a tapestry.

Shipp’s childhood toys form the core of his Star Wars collection, but it has grown much, much larger over the years. The most heavily merchandised film franchise of all time is well-represented here with hundreds of items. The walls of the “trophy room” are lined with boxed action figures, all hung for display. There are dioramas of the Tatooine cantina booth where Han Solo and Chewbacca met Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and of the hallway in Princess Leia’s spaceship Tantive IV where we first see R2-D2 and C-3PO.

But the collection is much more varied than just items from the two biggest science fiction film and TV franchises. “It’s not just sci-fi. We say pop culture,” says Dandy. “We love to leave ‘Easter eggs’ in the house.”

There’s a handmade, hand-shaped chair, a reproduction of a famous design from the swinging ’70s. The custom-made (Etsy-sourced) pulls on the kitchen cabinet doors are shaped like eyeballs. Leaning against the kitchen wall is an 8-foot-tall … toothbrush. It was an advertising display that Shipp rescued from a Kmart dumpster when he was 17. “I love things that are comically large and comically small,” says Dandy.

Next to it is a rolling cooler whose sides are formed by giant Snickers bars. Dandy says she was searching for that piece ever since she caught a glimpse of one on TikTok. Eventually, they found a near-mint-condition unit for sale by an Arkansas gas station owner. When they arrived, the seller honored the agreed-upon price of $50, but said he had been bombarded by inquiries ever since he had listed the item for sale.

How much is it really worth? “It’s got all its wheels, so probably somewhere between $250 and $500,” Shipp says.

That’s the couple’s passion in a nutshell: It’s all about the thrill of the chase. Their weekends are spent trawling estate sales (“We’ll drive hours to go to fun ones,” Dandy says), thrift stores, and antique malls, looking for under-appreciated pop-culture ephemera.

Dandy sells her own creations on the crafter’s website Etsy (her handle: PiperDandysRadCrap). She has attracted a social media following as she documented their home’s transformation the past year. “Dopamine Decor is a whole decorating subculture,” Dandy says. “It’s just whatever makes you happy.”