I’ve been in 3 different homes that had “secret” rooms. Although in 2 of them the current owners had removed the hidden doors and opened them up to make them a general part of the house. In those 2 cases they were quite large and designed to be an emergency bunker. In the still hidden case it was about 100 square foot area hidden behind a bookcase and designed to hold valuables.
Lets say your a real estate agent showing a home to a potential buyer.
When and how do you reveal the “secret” room to a potential buyer? Is it the first time you show it to them or do you wait until a later showing or where they have shown strong interest in the home?
Also would such a secret room be a plus or minus to the resale value of a home?
Also how common are secret rooms? To me what I’ve found is almost any home that belongs to an even moderately wealthy family probably has a secret room or at least a hidden closet or safe somewhere in order to hide valuables.
In the case where I purchased a house with a secret storage area to hide valuables I didn’t find out about it until I was handed a letter from the seller at closing giving details about how to find/open it.
The square footage is apparently measured from the outside. I have very carefully measured all rooms, hallways, and closets in several dwellings, and the figure I get is ALWAYS significantly (15-20%) less than the advertised/official figure.
Yes that is correct, in North America the square footage quoted is the external measurement of the home, and normally excludes the basement. Its is also normal to give the interior measurement of principal rooms.
This fascinates me!
Seriously, I have never heard of the concept of secret rooms in modern houses.
(Other than building a small safe into a wall and hiding it behind a picture.)
How common is this, and why do you need to do it?
I read where secret rooms add alot to a homes charm and can even be a selling point. Just think of the coolness factor of being able to pull a book down on a book case which releases a hidden lever which opens up a door to a secret room! Its kind of James Bondish. Often they are just play rooms or an office hidden away. So more homes are having them put in.
And as I said, almost all of the homes of the wealthy have them. Lets face it. We all own things we are very proud of which are valuable and you might not want visitors to know about them. Maybe its an expensive baseball memorabilia collection or art work. If you have a secret room the items can still be left out on display, but only certain people get to see them. The guy I knew kept his gun and wine collection in his. Although quite frankly I think you’d be blind not to guess the rooms location.
Random, probably useless data point: while househunting for a rental in Jakarta, we were shown a house with a secret passageway up to an attic room, which was (obviously) revealed to us by the agent.
Alas, the house did not work for us so we ended up somewhere else, but I’ve always felt a bit wistful that we couldn’t rent it.
I suspect the reason for the passageway was to make the house more desirable to paranoid types from foreign embassies. Not being paranoid, all I could think was “damn, that would be super cool for my nine-year-old son.”
Where I am, it depends on whether or not the basement is finished. If it’s got cement floor and cinderblock walls, its square footage is excluded; if it’s got normal flooring and walls, it’s in.
I read a book on building hiding places when I was a teen, and as I got the chances and gained the experience as a remodeler, I did a number of cool things.
One rental house had a living room the walls painted black and rough “rotten pine” planks all the way around. The black showed through the gaps and the 1/2 inch or so spacing between them - very cool, especially ca. 1980. One of those planks probably still comes off with a hard tug against the magnetic fasteners, to reveal a whole vertical line of small inset shelves behind it.
One house had dead soffits over the kitchen cabinets. A little bit of lower crown molding let me make them into pivoting doors, so that a considerable amount of stuff could be stashed above the cabinets.
Another had a cabinet over the stove that opened onto a large blank panel over the stove vent pipe, and smaller than expected shelves to each side. No worries about the panel falling off with those big screws holding it in place… except that they were false, and again magnetic fasteners held the plate in place. Pulling it off revealed shelves and bins around the exhaust duct. Some heat issues but not serious.
One closet was absurdly deep - almost seven feet deep, with an eight-foot ceiling and maybe 35 inches wide. Original construction, who knows why. I converted it to a media gear closet that was only 32 inches deep. Pull the rolling media rack out, duck under the 5-foot first shelf, and lift the counterweighted sliding panel to reveal a very large hidey space. I did some great camouflage work on that one.
The square footage also excludes the garage. So the exterior walls count in the measurement, all the interior walls, and the wall between the garage and the living area of the house gets counted too.
About safes, when I bought my current house (which has a safe embedded in the slab in the closet), the safe was disclosed by the sellers after we signed the contract to buy the house.
I have been in one house with a secret closet - it is a very large closet that you can get to by pushing on the right place on the living room wall. The house is two-story, with the lower floor being built against a hillside. The closet is basically cut out of the hillside and you could never tell by the exterior dimensions of the house.
Reminds me of the TV movie “Bad Ronald”. A kid accidentally kills another kid, and his mom fashions a hidden room for him to hide in. While he’s hiding, she dies and another family moves in. It really should be remade.
I would think that if you do a walk-through of any house, mentally drawing a floor plan as you go, any space of 100 sq/ft that is not accounted for would be conspicuous. I can’t imagine needing a thousand cubic feet for my “valuables”, unless I can get my Murcielago in there.
I could see [if the terrain allowed for it] when building digging a full sub basement with a hidden access [and maybe a drop chute for smallish items to get them hidden as quickly as possible while remaining upstairs ‘innocently’. ]
I have to admit, I always loved the whole batcave thing, I grew up watching the Adam West Batman - the flip open head with the button opening a secret panel with a couple of sliding poles down to the batcave. Ahhhhhh =)
