Built in 1845, single story victorian cottage with 9’ ceilings. Some time it was renovated and a bed room and bathroom were added up a tiny set of stairs, the ceiling in the kitchen was lowered at the same time. They created a stepdown space between the two rooflines including two small windows. Standing height for about 9’ then crouching attic space to the side walls.
The entrance in concealed behind a full length mirror on the bedroom wall. We call it the secret room.
There’s a pub in central London in which the bathroom doors are set into a large bookcase on one wall downstairs from the bar. It’s very funny to watch people following the signs downstairs and then walking around in circles looking for the door.
My friend’s house has a secret staircase. You enter on the the first floor through a built in cabinet with a false back. On the second floor you exit through a deep closet in a bathroom (again, a false back in the closet) and on the third floor through a closet in a bedroom. The house is over two hundred years old but the stair was added by an eccentric relative in the early 1900s. It’s hidden so well that you’d never guess it was there.
Also, the House of Seven Gables Salem MA has a hidden staircase that tourists can climb but it’s not as impressive as the one in my friends house imo.
A good friend of mine runs the 2bangkok.com website. Years ago, the old Soviet Embassy – the present-day Russian Embassy is elsewhere – went up for sale. A magnificent old building. My friend posed as a potential buyer so he could go in and have a look around. The main page of his report is here, but there are links to hidden rooms and stairways to nowhere, stuff like that. Makes you wonder what all went on there during the Cold War days. It’s not very far at all from the US Embassy.
The last I heard, some fitness group – maybe California Wow – had bought it to turn it into a branch, but I’m not sure if anything was ever done to it. I think the plans stalled.
My friend’s house had a secret staircase to the attic, behind what appeared to be a built-in cabinet in their dining room. The whole thing swung out to get to the stairs. It didn’t sit that tightly, so it wasn’t all THAT hidden really, but it was still pretty cool.
A campus house I lived in in college had a boarded up staircase behind and IIRC partially under the one that was in use. If you really wanted to, you could access the space from a panel above the countertop in the kitchen. I never bothered to wiggle myself in, but it was rather neat to look at – just this abandoned set of stairs, one half flight, a landing, and then part of another flight leading upwards until it dead-ended against the underside of the second floor.
We happened to pass through the major intersection that the old building is near. Or was near, as due to the condo/shopping-center construction right on the corner, we couldn’t tell if that was blocking the old building or if it’d already been torn down.
You are failing in your investigatory duties, man. Get over there and see if the building still stands!
I looked at the pictures of it. It looks as if the building was a truly lovely lady in her time, and it’s sad to see what neglect and, errr, remodeling for official and unofficial functions have done to her.
One of the grand homes in Lafayette Square in St. Louis is owned by friends of friends. We were at a party one night and were able to tour the basement, which still has an entrance to what apparently used to be a tunnel system. The story is that a number of homes in the area have these tunnel entrances, which were used during Prohibition.
The Lemp Brewery tunnels (in a nearby neighborhood) are the more famous set of tunnels, connecting to the natural caves beneath the city. But supposedly Lafayette Square inhabitants were also skulking around underground from more-or-less hidden entrances in the basements of their houses.
(Incidentally, we are in the same neighborhood as the Lemp Brewery, and sometimes I wonder about the sinkholes in our back yard. Will the whole thing, house and all, one day collapse into an underground cave? Eeek. Our local pond drains periodically into the caves beneath.)
Update on the old Soviet Embassy. Renovations are coming along nicely, as you can see here. There will be a restaurant in front and luxury villas in the back.
Stairs and passageways just for the servants also helped foster their own privacy in their part of the house. IIRC in large houses the staff might have its own dining room presided over by the butler, in addition to small rooms that the workers lived in when not on duty. However aristocratic they might be, it was considered rude for members of the family to invade the privacy of the servants’ quarters.
So amazing to grow up in!