The Bunny Museum, destroyed by Eaton fire, vows to return

Among the losses in the devastating Eaton fire was The Bunny Museum, husband-and-wife Steve Lubanski and Candace Frazee’s grand ode to the world’s hoppiest animal, the rabbit. The Altadena museum, located on Lake Avenue, was one of Southern California’s quintessentially quirky institutions, a place that transported guests to a strange and magical world where the bunny permeates all aspects of life.

There were stuffed bunnies (including the first bunny that Lubanski gifted Frazee, the one that he gave her because they used to call each other “bunny” as an endearment), hundreds of miniature porcelain bunnies, a bunny T-shirt collection, bunny cookie jars, bunny movie posters (including “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Peter Rabbit”), a bunny song room (Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” for one), bunny costumes, bunny books, bunny items from Rose Parade floats, and on and on.

The couple ended up collecting more than 46,000 bunny objects and memorabilia in all — a certified Guinness World Record for largest bunny collection in the world.

The Bunny Museum, photographed before the fire, had the world’s largest bunny collection.

(Maxwell Williams / Los Angeles Times)

Most of it burned in the fire on Wednesday. “We lost our wedding albums, my wedding dress, and 46,000 bunny objects,” Frazee wrote in an email from a motel, as her phone was also lost in the fire.

It was a life’s work, and Lubanski stood outside the building hosing it down until the building next door caught fire. It was then that the couple grabbed a few select bunny items, their real bunnies, Doris and Nicky, and their cats, and left.

“We saved the first bunny and the second bunny of the collection,” Frazee said. “Gifts to each other. We saved the antiquity items, three framed Guinness World Record certificates and the Elvis Parsley water pitcher.”

But, she added: “It’s not a hoppy day.”

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On Thursday, Frazee vowed to fans on social media that the museum would rebuild, hopefully in the same space. She said the museum has yet to set up a GoFundMe page, though they plan to, and that any current fundraising efforts floating around are not sanctioned by the museum.

The museum began as a humble endeavor in 1998. Frazee and Lubanski had been collecting bunnies since that first one, and they had enough in their arsenal to open the first location, in their Pasadena home, to the public by appointment. It was an oddity back then, but people came. They told their friends about this strange collection of bunny items, and the collection grew, and finally, in 2017, the museum expanded to Altadena, to the 7,000-square foot mid-century building that they proceeded to stuff to the brim with bunnies.

As Frazee used to tell nearly everyone that entered, it was the “hoppiest place on Earth.”