I would love to have secret rooms, that would be the best!
Not really “secret,” but at my grandmother’s house (built c. 1900) there is a storage area under the eaves with an access door at the back of a closet. The door (really just a moving panel) had been painted over so many times that we had the fun of rediscovering it when I was a kid. No one in the family had realized it was there, although after it was found, my grandmother vaguely remembered it being mentioned when she and my grandfather bought the house in the 1930s.
And not really a room, when we bought our house a few years ago – I’m not going to be able to describe this well – the kitchen cabinets don’t match up with the width of the counter. It took us forever (well, a few months, but with lots of attempts) to figure out how to spring a section of the wall paneling to open up a fairly good sized storage area. The cabinets aren’t original to the house, so this must be fairly recent. Drug stash? It would be easily missed in a basic search of the house because the paneling is so seamless.
The sort of funny thing is that I assumed right away it had a nefarious purpose, but it’s probably just as likely that the owner thought the same thing I would, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a secret storage area?”
A friend of mind had a secret room that he build into his basement. From what I was told, if he had sold the house the new people probably wouldn’t even know it was there it was so well hidden. Not only that but it had it’s own ventilation to keep ummm smells out of the main part of the house. I won’t say what he was gro…er doing in there, but he made the news one night when he fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand.
I once lived in the upstairs apartment of an old Craftsman style house that had a small door ( about 24"X24") in the living room (once a bedroom). It was fully trimmed, so it wasn’t really a secret space, but the space behind it was surprising. Going through the door, there was about a 2’ drop into an 8’X8’ room. The room had a hanging light bulb and a lovely round window for natural light. It also had shelving on either end and a bench down either side. I used it mostly for storage, but had one bench set up with art supplies, kid’s books, etc. for when the neices and nephews visited.
Secret passages fascinate me. I’ve made a point of adding new ones during all my home renovation projects.
The most elaborate of my secret passages is the one in the library. All four walls are lined with bookcases. On the wall opposite the door on the third shelf down of the middle bookcase is a curious yellow book. Tilting that book down 45 degrees releases a latch permitting the whole bookcase to be slid backwards into the wall, revealing a narrow room hidden behind the library.
The secret bookcase weighs about 200lbs fully loaded with books, but it still slides open and closed on its tracks will only moderate effort.
Also in the library is a hidden cupboard under the built-in writing desk. It has one of those push-in magnetic things holding it closed. To open in, you just push it in, let go, and the thing pops it open. It’s really very tiny, you couldn’t store anything much larger than a stack of papers in.
In the screening room, the door to the projection booth is “semi-secret”. If you’re actually looking for it, it’s readily visible, but since it’s flush with the wall, wallpapered over, and the the floor molding continues beneath it, it’s easily to overlook the fine seams and small dark-colored door knob.
There’s also another secret cupboard there, under the stairs (the screening room is underground, used to be a basement). Much larger than the one in the library–you could climb in it, if you felt the need.
In my office-cum-studio, which is currently under construction, I intend to have a secret half-bath accessible through large a painting apparently hanging on the wall. The other side of the passage will also be hidden, disguised as a mirror. I’ll be building the office furniture myself, but I’ve not gotten that far ahead in planning beyond a vague room layout. There’ll probably be another one or two secret compartments.
Our house has a “secret cedar closet”.
In our bedroom (essentially, the entire upstairs of a bungalow), there’s a walk-in closet that we pretty much use to store luggage and bulk items. Once inside that closet, there’s a door on the side that leads into another closet that’s paneled in cedar.
You can always catch a faint hint of cedar in our bedroom; but you’d never find the source unless you know of the “secret cedar closet”.
When the people we bought our house from paneled the basement, they created a little room near the bottom of the stairs. You’d miss it unless you knew it was there and it is about 8’ x 8’. It also has two doors in it leading to storage. One leads directly under the steps; the other (accessible via a little 2’x 2’ door) leads to a dirt-floor crawl space under the complete length and width of our kitchen. I lovingly call it our ‘wine cellar’ after once losing/misplacing a case of wine from the Finger Lakes deep within it for 3 years.
Years ago, we lived in a town in Ohio that had a home that had been specially built by a local minister active in the Underground Railroad. We were able to take a tour of the house once, and it was absolutely honeycombed with secret passages, under-floor hiding spaces, hidden ladders leading to hidden rooms, and a tunnel in the basement. It was truly remarkable. You probably could have hidden 50 people in that house and never known they were there.
And my sister used to nanny for some billionaires who had a secret playroom for their kids. It was hidden off another even larger playroom, filled with every toy in the universe. But it was still a fun idea for the kids.
We toured a house that had a bookcase at the bottom of the steps to their basement. Sure enough the tour guide stopped us all pushed a button, out swung the bookcase and there was a full wine cellar behind it.
I have a small room in my basement that is especially well hidden. All it contains is a IBM 386 with a math co-processor hooked up the the internet. Unfortunately for you all, it’s the SDMB server.
My aunt’s house had a passage in the back of a closet that led to an entire apartment. She used it to give piano lessons (there was an entrance from the street).
Many shopping malls have passages in the back of each store that lead to the loading area.
A house in my old town used to have a sort of hidden access to a dry cistern. And our neighbor’s house supposedly had a tunnel from the carraige house to the main house.
We have a trap door in the floor of the garage. I think it was used to drop hay down to the horse stables underneath the garage. Weird, huh?
My BIL and SIL were dining at the home of some rich folks in Sedona that they’d just met. While dinner was being prepared, the husband took my BIL upstairs to see the “secret room.” It was an S&M den, complete with apparatus and a photo book of him and the wife (both pushing 70) in leather and masks and such. The in-laws were pretty blown away. They said they’d never guess in a gazillion years that this conservative-looking couple would swing that way.
Living in Herndon, VA in 1986. After living in a townhouse for about a year I noticed a sealed up area under the stairs had a loose screw. I assumed it was a panel to allow access to pipes or something but for some reason removed the screws to see how big an area it was to see if I could put xmas lights away.
There were 3 large storage cases in there. When I pulled one out it contained 12 magnetic tape reels marked SECRET and labelled Defense Mapping Agency. All in all there were 31 tapes.
I called them and they sent a retrival team out to take possession on them with a CIA guy. They located a buried (in my shed) short wave radio. The neighbors described a “foreign” guy that lived alone and kept to himself that lived there before I moved in.
And before you ask, no they NEVER told me any other information at all and the agents never returned for another visit.
Ever since I bought my house I keep having recurring dreams (nightmares?) that there are a lot of secret rooms in my house. Or at least, rooms I just didn’t know about.
Not exactly a secret room, but some friends of mine noticed an extra window on the outside of their house after they had lived there for over a year. It was on the second floor, and was apparently installed before the builders realized it would fall where an intersecting wall for the stair well ended up, so they dry walled over it on the inside, and left it on the outside. It is only visible from the roof of the garage, or the extreme corner of their back yard.
It’s not a “secret”, but the inside of one of the closets in my bedroom is also the inside of my daughter’s closet. The reason being that the closet was once a hallway of sorts before another part of the house was added on next to our bedroom. My daughters think this is the coolest thing ever and love to clamber back and forth over my shoes making a general mess of everything.
Our last house had a walk-in closet in the master bedroom that had a small door in the side wall that led to storage under the eaves. There’s a similar door on the other side of the room that is not hidden. I make a point of showing these to potential buyers because it’s almost all the storage the house has, and because the little doors are cute.
I can’t understand this at all. Didn’t they read Nancy Drew or the Secret Garden or the Happy Hollisters or the V.C. Andrews books or…well, never mind. I’d love to have a secret place in my house, but then I’d use it all the time so I guess it wouldn’t be a secret. Also, I wouldn’t want to just know about it…I’d have to discover it properly.
I do have a piece of furniture with a couple of secret compartments, but unfortunately I don’t own anything cool enough to hide in there.
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