Hunting & Gathering at Hound & Quail

Hound & Quail owners Travis Flazer (standing) and Mark Pei

It’s slightly ironic that a shop that specializes in vintage goods, Hound & Quail in Chinatown, has reached a modern hallmark of success: People have started using its name as a verb.

“We have been asked to work with some other places, like retail spots and residences – they say, ‘Can you come look at our space and can you “Hound & Quail” it?'” explains Mark Pei, who co-owns the business with Travis Flazer.

Hound & Quail features a curated collection of vintage items – or as Flazer puts it, “vintage oddities.” It’s like an antique store, but neater and more focused in its arrangement. Throughout the shop are old game boards, gum ball machines, school desks, luggage and furniture, as well as a scattered menagerie of taxi-dermy – vibrant blue butterflies, a fox and a small aviary. There are the more practical items, like film cameras and typewriters. Then there are things that verge on creepy – skeletal and anatomical models, an autopsy table, and even, tucked behind other medical supplies, a large box that reads, “Human Blood Handle With Care.” Taken together, it’s like if a mad scientist had really, really good taste.

“It’s sort of just spreading what we enjoy,” Pei explains.

In stocking the shop, Flazer and Pei search for the most unusual items they can find. Whether it’s the novelty or just the inherent strangeness that attracts people, their particular aesthetic has been amassing popularity: Little drops of Hound & Quail can now be found throughout Chinatown – taxidermy in Robert Oaks, décor at Mojo Barbershop, whiskey bottles at The Manifest. Flazer and Pei also have been called upon by a slew of local businesses and private residences to curate a look for their spaces, and have a small pop-up at MORI by Art + Flea.

“The aesthetics of this shop is what people find interesting. It’s things that might not work individually, but when you put them all together, they do,” Pei says. “And it has sort of taken off for us – people like the look.”

For Flazer and Pei, Hound & Quail is a passion project. They both have other careers – Flazer as assistant technical director for Punahou School’s theater department and Pei as a pilot.

Flazer and Pei, who also are a couple, met about 10 years ago, on a tour of supposedly haunted downtown buildings. Flazer went hoping to see a ghost -“I really thought I was going to have an experience,” he recalls – but he met Pei instead and the two started talking. After the tour, the conversations continued, unravelling their shared penchant for a particular set of interests – history, Hawaiiana, ghost stories and old furniture.

Over time, those conversations manifested into a mid-century furniture store, Area, which evolved into Hound & Quail in 2007 when they launched at their first location on Kapiolani Boulevard before opening the current shop last fall.

Finding accouterments for the shop is an ongoing effort for the pair. They constantly are on the hunt – mining estate sales, sifting through flea markets. If you don’t know what estate sales are, when downsizing your home or if you experience the passing of a loved one you can sell the belongings in the estate to an estate sale service who will give you cash for it and then go on to sell the items (usually in an auction. Take a look at the Wisconsin Estate Sales Services to find out more. You can usually find a lot of unique items when you go to these estate sales which is why they like them so much. Much of what they find comes from trips – Pei’s layovers in New York, Los Angeles or Phoenix, as well as vacations to Japan or Europe. In one corner of the shop, there’s a display of miniature roe deer antlers – one of Flazer’s favorite items – that they picked up on a recent trip to The Netherlands.

They admit that the process is not exactly a refined one.

“We don’t think logically,” Pei says. “If we like (an item) we will just get it – and sometimes it doesn’t make sense.

“What happens typically is that people who don’t have an interest in this stuff, they end up throwing it out, and so in a way, we are actually rescuing a lot of these things that otherwise would have ended up in the landfill or just destroyed.”

Recently, the scope of Hound & Quail has been becoming just as eclectic as its merchandise. Beneath the shop, its basement doubles as a gallery called The Outpost that houses everything from gallery exhibits to interactive performance art. One show, for instance, focused on cryptozoology, displaying artists’ interpretations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. In another, an artist blew colorful glass unicorn horns and filled the room with fake snow.

Twice a month, Hound & Quail hosts wine classes, covering topics like wine and chocolate pairings or the basics of what to order with different types of food.

“We set this up right in the middle of the shop – it’s a really fun environment to just try wines and be surrounded by super creepy stuff,” Pei says with a laugh.

Flazer and Pei say that they have noticed more and more people – notably younger people – who are drawn to older things. Millennials who weren’t around for technologies like typewriters or Super 8 cameras are adopting these tools. It’s what Pei has dubbed the “anti-technology movement.”

Their observations have empirical basis, too – a 2013 Intel Labs study found that 61 percent of Millennials were concerned about the way technology is affecting their lives. While the vast majority indicated that it made their life easier, they also seemed to lament just how much they relied on it. Of the groups polled, Millennials were the least excited about technology.

“It’s a nostalgia of things,” Flazer muses. “Like with film and people writing letters again.

“I think it is people taking power back and control into their lives,” he continues. “Everything is so easy and electronic – ” “Brainless, almost,” Pei adds.

Hound & Quail features a curated collection of vintage items, including typewriters and taxidermy

” – that you feel like you get lost in it,” Flazer continues. “But to be able to step back and slow down and really physically do something – to develop a picture, to write a letter, to letterpress, to screen print – gives you a sense of taking back that power of you physically doing it. And I think a lot of people really want to slow down.”

“I am glad that we can bring back things that are not so instant,” Pei says.

While not everything in Hound & Quail is necessarily all that old, everything does come from somewhere else, rather than being mass produced and out of a box. As Pei says, “everything has a story.”

Like the one about a plastered hand mold they had a while back. At an estate sale, they had found a child-sized plaster hand and put it up for sale. One day, a tattoo artist came in to browse and picked it up.

“He came up to the register really nonchalant and he was like, ‘I am going to get this,'” Pei recalls. “And without any fanfare, he was like, ‘That is my wife’s name on the bottom.'”

“It went though this whole thing just to get back to them,” Pei says.

“It was just so bizarre,” Flazer says.

Hound & Quail is located at 920 Maunakea St. It recently has begun regular hours: from 1 to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. For more information, visit houndandquail.com.