Your home is your castle. So if you want to install a huge window in your street-facing toilet, by all means, go for it.
Just keep in mind that not only your neighbors, but the entire internet might shame your decision. Plus, selling a property with, let's call them, extravagant features can be tricky.
To learn more about people's architectural whims, Reddit user OuterSpacewaysInc made a post on the platform, asking construction workers to share stories about all the secret rooms and other strange compartments they had to build for the owners. Turns out, plenty of folks have secrets they want to keep to themselves.
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Residential contractor here. A client once asked that I add a 4x6 room next to the master that would be "just big enough to allow someone to 'calm down' if they were being 'bad'". Specs had no windows. Brick walls. Double thick door, etc. He gave off that creepy as hell vibe, but you know, money.
Anyway, the job was going fine until we ran out of red bricks and started using those blue and yellow ones. He lost his s**t! Canceled the contract and never looked back.
tldr: My son's standards for Lego houses are so high that Jesus himself couldn't reach them.
Just moved into a house that was built in the 70s. The previous owners custom built it, and the architect was the man's old frat buddy. Custom stuff everywhere (trash chute straight from the kitchen into the garage wheelie bin!).
When we first looked at the house, we really loved it, but there was no office space that my husband could use for his music stuff. It was the only disappointing thing about the house, but since everything else was so perfect, we went ahead and put in the offer.
When we were doing another walkthrough with our parents, we showed them the walk up attic, which is pretty cool too. When I turned around to leave, I noticed a wall of insulation that looked....different. if you push the insulation to one side, a doorknob appears. And behind it is the secret office.
Coolest house ever.
My dad is a doctor and does a lot of construction at home in his free time. This one time he was moving a wall, making one room smaller and another bigger. He was putting an entire-wall-bookshelf kind of thing in the smaller room, and just to f**k with future homeowners he snatched one of those plastic skeletons from his job and hid it in the space between the bookshelf and the wall
I expect headlines sometime in the future
In the 1970s, a group of Edinburgh students living in a flat in Niddry Street, in the city's Old Town, knocked on a wall and heard a hollow sound.
Curious, and probably drunk, they knocked a hole through it, where they exposed an old labyrinth of corridors and rooms underneath North Bridge, nearly half a mile in length. People had lived and died in these rooms, underneath the city's bridge. There had been bars and brothels, and doss houses for the poor.
People in Victorian times had closed it off and subsequent generations had forgotten where the entrances were.
Never built one, but I did find one in a house I was doing some plumbing work in once. This was an expensive condo, and they had a secret office that had a secret one-way mirror looking into the GUEST SHOWER. Creepy as f**k, man.
Was a draughtsman for a while. Two super wealthy Chinese parents were building all three of their children houses on their massive property. I was asked to design the ironing room for the eldest daughter. She...genuinely liked doing ironing? And laundry? I ended up designing this massive room with bay windows overlooking the lake with all sorts of storage compartments and a variety of ironing stations. She loved it, I got a healthy bonus, and I'm still confused to this day.
Wife and I had a secret, soundproof "sex dungeon" type room built adjacent to our bedroom. The reason for the room is that we have various devices in there that are impractical to disassemble and put away when we have friends over (or the day we have kids and still want to enjoy our fun discreetly).
We had some devices installed when we built the room, such as a large metal cage and other restraining devices. The people who built the room probably asked us a hundred times if we were sure we didn't plan to abduct people. The architect nearly dropped the project when I jokingly asked him to make sure there'd be an electric outlet to plug a chainsaw.
During the finishing stages of doing a basement, the customer decided she wanted a wall with dead space behind it. Gave no reasoning, only details how big she wanted it. I had joked multiple times it would end up being a tiny grow room for Marijuana.
It ended up becoming a small grow room for Marijuana.
I had a client once who wanted a safe room. Full concrete, ballistic glass, rated to withstand explosions, reinforced doors, separate power, and HVAC systems. Dedicated phone and tele/data as well with direct alarms to security and the police.
The thing that was unusual was that they wanted it handled entirely separately. A different building permit, with a different crew, all work being done at night. If anyone was ever able to find blueprints or permits to plan a Hollywood-style caper, they wouldn't know about the safe room. (This was a public building, not a private residence.)
Was it a company with sensitive and/or classified material?
This one to me is the coolest. We have a family friend who is a builder and built his own house (obviously). I haven't been over to his house in a while, but last time I was there, they were still finishing it (they've been finishing it for several years, and you'll see why soon). Their house is 7 stories tall (4 above, 3 basement levels), has elevators, a full-size basketball court (indoors), several kitchens and living rooms, a huge theater room, an apartment that is attached with its own kitchen, living room, dining room, and 4 bedrooms, and the main house has countless bedrooms and other multipurpose rooms. The house is enormous.
BUT the coolest part is the house has those McDonald's slides in it. There are 2 in it (maybe more now) of these slides. One goes from the top floor to the bottom, and one goes from the top floor to ground level. In the biggest one however, there is a secret passage, thats kind of hard to get to. When the slide gets to its steepest point, you have to brace yourself against the walls so you stop. If you can, the slide actually has a tunnel to the side that you can take. When you go through that secret tunnel, it takes you to a secret balcony in their in-home theater, with a fridge and chairs and stuff. It's a pain in the butt to get to, but it's really cool.
They do have a few other hidden rooms, but unfortunately, the guy who owned the house wouldn't tell us, he said we had to find them on our own. Every time I was there spent the entire time knocking on walls, inspecting bookshelves, etc
I'm curious about how they restock that fridge. Is there another entrance or do they have to slide carrying a tray of snacks? Lol
I am not a construction worker. I. attended a private boarding school when I was younger the school itself was 200+ years old and the castle it was built around was much older. Upon exploring I and a few other friends found an entrance to a system of tunnels that ran beneath the school. The tunnels were used as maintenance tunnels for the old heating system that was once run from a gas boiler system. Originally we thought that was why they were built. We began trying to map out the tunnels and used to spend hours underneath the school during study time/ night roaming around with a measuring tape drawing it to scale. We never completed the map due to the systems enormity.
As we got further and further into the tunnels we learnt that these were much older than just the gas boiler. A new, cement tunnel seemed to extend about a kilometer in radius. Past a kilometer the tunnels got older and more dangerous. We found that they extended all the way out to a pavilion in our school. These passages were also in cement but were very clearly much older. Most of my time as a 14-year-old was spent roaming around them. It gave us passages into locked rooms, the castle (banned grounds), to the forests, etc. We decorated a lot of the walls down there in shoe polish and stolen art paints. We would even smoke down there a mere few feet below the headmaster's office.
Had a request to build a hidden room which was to my belief be used as a sex dungeon. He requested low-hanging support beams, a sunken in part for "storage" we painted it in red and black colours. The floor was tiled in one portion for a drain.
Electrician here. Have done a few. The coolest was a secret passageway and attached room in a very nice house. It was hidden by a movable bookshelf on both ends. The guy said he didn't have a specific reason for building it, he just always thought it would be cool to have a secret passageway in his house.
The other one that stands out was an underground survival bunker accessed through a hidden door in the back of a garage. It had an additional exit by means of an underground tunnel that lead almost 100 feet in the bordering forest. The strangest thing about it was that it was a survival bunker where he had our wire with outlets and lights, despite there not being any type of backup/off-the-grid power. Makes me think that he actually had an alternative purpose for the shelter.
Electrician here. The customer wanted a sliding bookcase that hid 2 fire poles that slid down into the basement. Just like the old Batman TV show. He even had the bust on his desk that had a button under the flip-up head. The customer told me the bust was from the original show.
The house also had a couple of hidden doors and a panic room hidden behind a Tardis. It really was bigger on the inside.
There's this one house we did where there was a concealed stairway from the master bedroom to the dining room, just so the parents could get booze and snacks without walking past the kid's rooms. Concealed because at the top of the stair was a massive safe.
Plenty of times. There was one I never saw the finished stages of that was basically an entire apartment accessible only by a small hatch in a closet. Either the homeowner was planning to harbor criminals, or a mistress, a man in an iron mask, or just really wanted to be able to get away from his family. Hope it wasn't like an HH Holmes thing.
Did a lot of mansions and this wasn't insanely common but far more than I expected. There was one builder that did a lot of these houses who managed to find a retired electric chair that he kept in a hidden room. He 'joked' that when his kids were bad he would make them sit in it for a few hours. It didn't have power running to it but still.
I built a Narnia closet for someone. Their daughter had one request for the new house: she had a built-in armoire, white and modern looking with nice shelving units on the right side and a bigger opening on the left. However, when you pushed the back of the left, closet side, it opened up into an actual closet that was about 5x10 feet on the inside, not too shabby at all. Was a pretty fun build, albeit somewhat challenging. Edit: spelling/words.
I was a custom interior carpenter and I did two. One was a bookcase that opened up into a large storage area.
The other was a hidden room behind their wine cellar. We installed a custom wine rack on a piano hinge, with a latch in the space behind one of the bottles. In the room, they installed a safe and a gun safe. All of the electronics for the house lived down there, as well as a panel that opened up into the main living room, in case you wanted to shoot an intruder from the safe room.
Booze, guns, and safety all in one place. I guess what I'm saying is that I know where I'm going when the zombies come.
I used to work construction over the summers in high school and within just a few miles of where I grew up there are 20,000sq+ foot homes...anyways this one client (who was pretty well known for being a CEO of a large corporation) requested a secret self-contained smoking room. Complete with a secret entrance, a bathroom, cedar paneling, self-contained heat and A/c, and an industrial-sized smoke-eater. Along with hideaway shelving that would store an endless amount of mason jars full of pot. Also has some crazy vaporizer as well. He would have meetings upstairs in his underwear and robe whole being high as f**k
whaaaaaaaaaaaaat???? they let a high guy become CEO of a big company?!
I've been painting houses since I was 15 and I've done two. One was a room behind a bookcase for the kid's playroom. The second was in a millionaire's summer home. On the fourth floor of the house, there was a closet on the same wall as the elevator. A section of drywall came away and lead to behind the elevator. There was a wooden ladder that went up and down the entire house, at the very top was a trap door that lead to a small room that was about 6 by 6 feet. It had windows and vents that could be opened or sealed completely. Pretty sure it was for their son to hotbox.
I convinced my brother to add a secret door from one closet to the other closer between his daughters rooms when we were building his house.
I had what I thought for years was a memory, (but is impossible so must have been a dream) of playing hide and seek not long after moving to the house my grandad built. I was hiding and was inside the wardrobe in my room. When whoever was searching for me came into my room I slid open the back of the wardrobe and went into the back of my mum's one. I wish it had been real because it was so cool.
Kinda not secret. In my old flat, I had a room that was locked with a big yale lock. Whenever we'd have people round, they would always want to know what was in there, but I never let on.
It was my hobby room, so to speak. I used to fix up vintage guitar amps in there and the lock was there simply as I couldn't trust my drunk friends to not go in there to mess with stuff. Amps have lethal voltages even when they haven't been used in a while.
But, I liked the mystique and intrigue whenever people were around. The women were the worst and their hypotheses were always centered around a secret dodgy sex life.
My house has two secret rooms, one of them is the obligatory bookshelf. A real shelving unit with real books, that also.... (clicks a secret button)
Is your secret button the light switch? Because in the first picture it's "off" in the second picture it's "on"
When the local FBI office in the city I live in was being built an owner change order came in to make all the finishes in these two rooms in the basement rated for pressure washing. These two rooms were immediately nicked named the murder rooms by the construction workers.
I work for a contractor. We once built a house for a family with three kids. Each bedroom had a high bed, accessible by a ladder, built into the room itself. And each bed had a little door in it that led to a tunnel connecting all the rooms together. Pretty cool!
Yes, we worked on what was supposedly going to be a hidden/secret walk-in safe in the basement. This room was heavily reinforced.
Normally, walls around doors are framed using wood. This door frame was solid reinforced concrete. The room was a square attached to the outside of the basement, so all four walls were concrete. We poured concrete above it, so the ceiling was concrete. (Very unusual!) We also poured the floor.
So, it was six sides made of concrete. Since it was attached to the outside, there was no sign that it existed from the inside. No ventilation. No wiring from what I saw.
I never saw the finished product, but the owner was keeping it a secret, and wouldn't explain much about it. So another contractor finished it off.
So... no ventilation, 6 sides of concrete... I might be being dumb here but would you not suffocate in a room like that?!
A friend of the family works as a custom cabinet maker. Most of his jobs involve him making secret compartments for rich clients. Mainly desks with a secret place that can hide guns, keys, ledgers, and swords (oddly enough a lot of people request that), but also that stuff in bookshelves, picture frames, etc. He also gets your typical movable bookshelves.
Yep. All the time. People that can afford it pay a lot for panic rooms and hidden armories. Swinging bookcases, doors in wall paneling, you name it. People with that much money usually have something to protect.
I used to do some construction work on schools during the summer. The principal wanted, in his closet, a door to slide up where he could keep safe for special school records, and a mini-fridge. Although it wasn't very big or that cool. It was the coolest work I ever was involved in that summer. Plus, who wouldn't want a mini-fridge hidden in their wall?
Carpenter. I built a grow-room for a guy's medical marijuana in Vermont. An alarm was wired directly to the state police barracks in the event of a burglary.
Architect here, a bit late to the game. I just finished designing a hone where the client LOVED their cats. And I mean loved. They wanted a room dedicated to cat feeding. Also in this room was a narrow, cat-sized ramp that lead into a basement room dedicated to litter boxes.
It didn't occur to me until long after the drawings were done that this looked VERY much like a food chute into an otherwise isolated, windowless basement room.
(Yes, there was a door into the litter room for the changing of the litter boxes.)
Engineer here, I've done some rooms behind bookshelves and secret doors under the floorboard. They actually require some pretty unique solutions both engineering-wise and architecture-wise. Usually, the client's reasoning is, "because it would be awesome"
My parent's house has a "secret" room that's behind a bookshelf in their master bedroom. The reason is put quotations around "secret" is because this hidden room is wall to wall open window. So basically, you could hide from someone inside of the house, but if they happen to walk around outside, you appear to be in a normal room.
An old house I used to live in built between 1900 and 1910, used to have a small panel in the floor of the laundry room that had steps leading into a separate room in the unfinished stone basement. I'm pretty sure it was used during the prohibition era, as there were a bunch of really old glass bottles down there. Could be wrong but it was pretty cool regardless.
A bit early for prohibition if it was built the same time as the house. More likely originally just a regular cellar.
Not a construction worker, but in my old house one of the bedrooms had a small opening to the crawlspace that was made to look like a large mouse hole.
I worked for a very wealthy man, and he had hidden rooms and sliding book cases etc. When he would need comm equipment in these areas, we would gain access. Some also were built around wiring channels and we would find them because the dimensions of the room didn't fit. We'd have to tell his assistant and let her know we knew, so she could let him know we knew and needed to get access. He had a hidden pistol range, a few safe rooms, and a pretty bada** gun room tucked away into the 3 properties I had access to. All of the work was top-notch, and unless you knew they were there it was very difficult to find them.
I want to tell my story, so I will.
A house I lived in when I was younger had a secret little passage. My step-brother jumped out from a mirror one day and I nearly soiled myself. Turns out the mirror swung open to a passage under some pipes and then into the electric (or whatever) cupboard in the hallway. You wouldn't know because of the pipes, but there surely was a way around and through.
The weirdest part was that there was a gigantic bloodstain on the floorboards, near the mirror. I told myself that someone waited behind the mirror and then jumped out and stabbed some unsuspecting soul.
I once built a whole level of a room that was half the size of the others. It was a half room, I don't know why they wanted a half room, but it was not accessible with stairs, and the only way to get there was by stopping the elevator.
My dad was a builder for 25 years and built a few into his own homes. One was an office that looked like a normal wall but had a door handle under the dido rail. He used it for drafting plans for his building projects and for storing guns, valuables, etc. Another was a slide-out shelving unit that accessed a storage room under the stairs. Again, it was used for gun storage and to keep them safe in. He also built a lot of loose or latched tops on bits of seemingly permanent decorations/furniture for my mum to keep her jewelry in.
I am in HVAC. While working on a large house a few years back I thought it was odd that on the plans there were two heat pumps for the garage. Well, on-site the garage was two levels one regular-looking garage with a basement. This basement had a built-in safe on one end and was fortified. (Concrete stairs, no windows, extra thick doorways and lots of power and large ventilation duct) This room was labeled "lab". The owner was a big muscle-bound dude with a brand new tricked-out hummer and lavish stuff everywhere. The lab was to make his energy/ protein goop...or so they said.
A few months after we were done, we were still working in the neighborhood, the cops raid the place. Haz-mat team the whole bit. It was a steroid lab in the basement.
Well, this one time a laundry company in Albuquerque wanted me to put in a secret chamber below a piece of industrial equipment. For some reason they insisted it be completely impregnable against flies...
The OP is joking. The Laundry company in Albuquerque was the Meth lab in Breaking Bad
I built a dishwasher look-a-like dildo compartment. Eh, who am I kidding, I had a dishwasher full of dildos.
I'm not a construction worker, though I helped my brother measure a wine cellar once. We had the planimetry of the whole thing, but couldn't find a particular area - some kind of tight passage that went from one side of the winery to the other. We asked the owner what it was and he smiled, opened the door to one of the rooms where the wine was stored, removed the bottles from the shelf, which turned out to be a door. Inside this secret cellar, he kept his oldest and most precious wines. Pretty sweet and impossible to find without the planimetry.
planimetry [ pluh-nim-i-tree ] noun the measurement of plane areas.
I did Carpentry and tile for a year last year. We put a panic room in for a gentleman, who happened to be named Kennedy, and also worked for the Department of Defense. I thought these were all weird coincidences. What we did was put a doorway in the back of their bedroom closet, this led to an enormous area of unused space above their garage. We framed and drywalled this space and turned it into a walk-in "closet", with a trap door in the floor that released into the ceiling of the garage. This was a very fun project, but very much had a panic room feel to it the whole time. They had K's all over their house. For Kennedy. Weird
On the other end of things here. Currently, live in an ex-grow-op house, and I'm wondering what some signs of hidden rooms would be. The drug lord that lived here before was a shifty man and there could be a hidden room in here somewhere.
I’d be looking for mold instead of secret rooms. Grow-op homes are notoriously hard to sell. Even if they’ve been completely gutted.
I'm a pool builder and we were asked to build a hidden pool room for the equipment and other random things we had stonemasons turn the whole underneath of the house into a secret room and blended the door into the wall. To open the door you needed to push a stone and the door opened automatically.
I don't work in construction, but I've always loved building things and when I was a junior in high school, I decided to remodel the basement that I was living in.
I intended on building a secret room behind a bookcase, because I thought they were cool. It would've been the size of a small closet, however, I got more caught up with more of the actual building process.
My basement flooded sometimes, so I tried to figure out a way to make it less of a problem. I decided to elevate the floor slightly, by laying a bunch of treated planks across to raise the floor an inch.
That took more time than I thought, so by the time I got to my secret room, I blocked the area off, but never made the entrance. A few years later we got some professionals to redo the basement and they told me that they were impressed by my solution for the floors, but didn't say a word when they noticed that I had blocked off an area that could've easily been used.
My mum actually bought a house with a moderately-secret room.
The basement is finished, with a tv room and bathroom and little bar/kitchen. When you go down the stairs, to the right is a set of sliding closet doors.
When you go to slide the door, it won't slide. You have to turn the knob on the closet door and push- and it opens up to a 16x16 room. My mum made it into her spare bedroom. We call it 'the cave' because there's no windows. We're super safe.
That could be a fire issue. In our area you can not call a room like that a bedroom unless there is a way to get out during a fire.
Not sure this counts.
Anyways.
I was interning with an advertising agency whilst at uni, and we went to an audio engineers place & in his main room was a big a** piece of circular glass with a few doe lights on behind it. Against the wall were some wines he kept as the temperature was perfect. Turned out it was the end of a big a** tunnel that went far into the Adelaide Hills. As in underground "into the hill" was pretty mind-blowing I thought
I was in a fraternity in college, and our house was a massive, 20k square foot, 100-year-old mansion. There were several secret rooms, two of them were built in the attic with ladder entry hidden behind bookcases. I'm sure they are extremely against code, but they're awesome.
Not a construction worker but my friend bought a house a couple of years back. It's an oddly designed house. As I understand, the previous owners just kept adding on additions, for instance, it has two kitchens, one down the hall from the other. Anyway, when he first moved in there was an unfinished room on the backside of the house with no windows. There was a padlock on the outside of the door. And a security camera mounted inside the room...
Previous owners are now his neighbors, and they are weird as hell. Like "The 'Burbs" weird.
A compound I built for a family had underground tunnels connecting all the houses to the main house's panic room. I got to smash the holes in the basement walls with a sledgehammer. That was a good day.
I have relatives that are particularly wealthy and they have a panic room. Given their home wasn't a custom home, they just modified an existing room. The room is a panic room with steel in the walls and a door that can withstand an explosive charge (according to them). The window outside of the room has steel bars surrounding it. What are they trying to protect? A safe that contains a few valuable comics and some guns. I'm really curious as to what comics are in there.
I worked for this builder who did only secret rooms and hidden passageways. He also grew lots of pot. So yes, I have built many secret (grow) rooms.
Funny story, when I was a kid. My parents were designing their dream home, they asked me as a child of about 8 at the time, what I would want my room to be like, I didn't care about my room but pleaded for a secret room connected to my bedroom, to my amazement they agreed...
Little did I know that they were about to ruin my f**king dreams. The house was built, my bedroom and the secret room were made, I was so f**king excited to finally see it... They blindfolded me and led me into my room and asked me to try find the secret room, after much searching I finally found it, it was hidden behind a swinging bookcase and it blew my f**king mind.
I quickly went inside... Only to see a full-sized door at the far end of my little secret room, upon opening it I was outside in the hallway next to my bedroom door... WHAT THE F**K PARENTS!? I tried, I swear I tried but the amount of times visitors stumbled upon me in my secret room thinking it was a bathroom in the hallway or a bedroom...
My childhood dreams were ruined... RUINED!!! Let this be a lesson parents of Reddit, you can ruin your child's dreams. They ended up using it to store spare mattresses. Sigh
Under my childhood home, there was a concrete room. You couldn't get to it from inside the house, and it was a b**ch to get to, but I never told anyone it was there because I wanted it all to myself.
My parents got divorced about six months after I found it and my dad lost the house about a year after that and it had since been demolished. I told my family about it a couple of years ago (20 years later) and nobody believes me.
Now looking back and thinking about it, it would have made an awesome grow room.
Yeah, working on a big house that this eccentric couple owned, there was a secret underground Olympic swimming pool, we installed a pool table that came out of the ground floor. Basically dug a big hole, some other dudes sorted all the pneumatics and electrics. Don't know what the table looked like at the end, but his swimming pool was dope.
I remember my friend had a secret staircase in his house that was behind a large floor mirror. His dad was someone high up in Shell or BP or some s**t.
Another thing, in my Grandparent's ancestral house in India, they seemingly lived in a large bungalow, but it turned out there was a secret staircase in a cupboard that led to the attic. There was basically nothing in the attic and it smelled like disgustingness, but 11 year old me thought it was the f**king coolest thing I'd ever seen
In the UK, there's a program on Channel 4 called "George Clarke's Amazing Spaces".
Some other couple on their own converted a dingy old basement to a Vegas-style casino/entertainment area, with a poker table, pool table, bar, and roulette.
The clincher? The entrance to it is behind a bookcase. He actually rotates a fake ornament and the whole bookcase flips UPWARDS. It looked f**king amazing.
I remember the secret product development room at a company I worked for being underground accessible through a trap door (hidden under a rug) via one of the testing workshops.
That was creepy, I spent a lot of time down there sorting out things for the meetings though. The trap door was lockable from the outside, kept getting paranoid I was gonna be locked in there as a joke by the engineers.
The guy who renovated the last house I lived in put a load of secret rooms into it. It was a super old Sears model home from the 30s that had been added onto/rearranged about 7 times in various fashions, and during his renovations, he put 5 secret rooms in the attic where I lived. We were super good friends with him so I knew of them (one I even used as a place to sleep because it had a window and good acoustics for music). I used a lot of the smaller ones to put clothes, random crap, etc but nothing much. The new owner who made us leave (the house was unstable and termite-infested due to a body of water under most of the street, and he was gonna renovate it) said he found a whole bunch more from previous renovations. We also had lots of weird storage.
My dream secret passageway is a spiral slide that leads from upstairs to downstairs.
(Not dissimilar to a laundry chute, but somehow more cool).
I read too many books as a child.
I somehow gained a reputation for being a discrete contractor and ended up building over 10 marijuana grow rooms/systems. I know where lots if goodies are!
I forgot about this one, about 10 years ago my friend was dating this girl whose family was having a house built. They also had a guest house built with a 30yard tunnel that attached both houses. Really interesting, only went there during the construction part, they didn't long enough to see the finished product.
I haven't done too many as I am a commercial and industrial electrician, although I did build one for Google.
We were 3/4 done doing 7 floors for them and they decided on the top floor they wanted a secret room. There was a wall-to-wall bookshelf with 1 book that if you pressed the spine, would open the door.
That was a very expensive room as they wanted it so late in the project, we charged them 4 times and they put up a fight, but accepted.
There wasn't much in there, some chairs, a fireplace, and a t.v. We always joked it was where the boss would take his interns but not likely, as there was no security on it.
not built, but discovered.
When we bought our current house, we were shown around the 3 similarly-sized square attic rooms. It was basically a square house. Dad pretty quickly figured there must be a fourth room somewhere.
Eventually, we found we could see what looked like a plaster wall through the cupboard on our back staircase. It was above the master bedroom and seems to have been boarded up years ago (the plaster has the plaster's name and 17xx written into it).
We cut through into it from one of the other attic rooms about 10 years ago now. It's only used for storage, so not that exciting.
work as a project engineer. Was building a hospital, not a secret room but definitely strange. On the top level, the architect plans had a door. Said door had a ID reader. If one with any level of clearance were to scan their id, the door would remain locked. However, in emergency situations, the door would become unlocked. This door opened onto nothing on the other side, just a roof 8 floors down.
I once worked for a celebrity who used to live in an old house in Los Angeles that had 6 hidden rooms; and within 3 of those hidden rooms, were three more hidden rooms, for a total of 9 hidden rooms... And the s**t this guy used to collect, wow...
When I was a kid I worked on a $12M+ mansion that had a safe room with reinforced concrete, solid steel door, backup power, and some kind of crazy techy infrared (I'm guessing) air filter.
The family moved into the house before we finished and they had two kids. When they played hide-and-go-seek their "timer" was switching floors with the elevator individually.
Not a secret room, but a friend of mine had a weird compartment in her house. In the middle of the dining room, there was a door that was about half the size of a normal door, maybe about 3 1/2 feet tall, same style as the rest of the doors in the house, knob in the same place halfway down as any other door. It led to a room, about 3' x 5', same height. It came wallpapered and carpeted similar to the rest of the house, but definitely intentionally decorated--my friend and her family never changed it. It was just this weird, half-sized room/finished crawl space.
Guest room for a friend/relative who was an LP (little person <5' tall adult)?
I know someone with a room hidden behind a bookcase.... In a hidden panic room. He uses it for storage but he said he just thought it would be cool to have.
A lot of people want to get married, have beautiful families, travel the world, help humanity, those sorts of things. I just want to have a custom secret room built into a home for myself one day. Then, I'll sit in the empty room in my lawn chair with a Coors Light, and announce...I have arrived.
My brother was a floor under for a time and did a lot of work in the heavily Jewish suburbs of the city. A lot of simple trapdoors under rugs that had stored water, food, chemical toilet. Nothing too elaborate.
I've always wanted a secret room that was accessible from underneath a wall next to a swimming pool. So you have your swimming pool, and on one side of it is seemingly a wall that goes right to the edge. If you dive into the pool, you can swim through a small hole that is near the bottom of the pool leading to the secret room. The secret room only has a very small bit of pool that you emerge from, and there are no other entrances or exits, nor windows.
Some years back I lived in a pub in the UK. it had previously had a floor which was dedicated accommodation for staff - which was then condemned by the fire inspector.
The owners sealed up the staircase/doors to this floor.
I cut a passage to it from my bedroom and had a hidden 4 bedroom condo in the west end of London for about a year.
Then it went horribly wrong...
I lived in a house built in the early 1800s - 3 stories with a basement and attic. After a year or so, I noticed a door at one end of the closet in the master bedroom. It opened into a staircase that led to the large pantry room next to the kitchen. The door in the pantry itself was a storage rack for things like mops and brooms, which is why it went unnoticed for so long. My husband and I kept this little secret from the rest of the family. Eventually they realized something was up because we would suddenly appear in the kitchen (or vanish mysteriously). When they asked about it, I shrugged and answered, "Rabbit holes". My eldest started staking out the pantry unbeknownst to us and after a few weeks he busted me sneaking downstairs for a midnight snack. He is an incredible artist and painted the stairwell with a Alice in Wonderland meets Neo in the Matrix themed mural. I absolutely loved it.
After years of construction my secret volcano base was looking pretty sweet until a load of ninjas abseiled in through the skylight and blew the place up.
Interesting that I found this today. I bought my house Oct 2019, my house was built in 2012. I found a secret room 3 days ago! It's behind my closet, it's the same length and width as my closet (15ft long 4ft wide) there's nothing in it but it doesn't show up on the blueprints and the realtor didn't know it was there either. I'm pretty stoked about it.
Didn’t you know, people who “own businesses “ were able to take out HUGE grants during the pandemic, between that and crypto making lots of stupid people who had money More money there’s more wealth than intelligence these days by FAR.
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Turned the coal closet in my basement into a fish breeding/ aquaponic room when I started my business. When I sold my business I turned it into a panic room. I have a 6×6 padded room in my basement. FTW
Had 2 in my old house. Small secret storage we called the bat cave. The Keep was the large room behind a book case in the office. Made it into a panic room/pantry/gun storage. I often wonder if the new owners found them.
In my old house, we had a small bathroom behind a bookshelf. My BIL loved announcing that he was gonna go pee behind my bookshelf. In my current house, my bedroom door is a bookshelf.
I lived in a house built in the early 1800s - 3 stories with a basement and attic. After a year or so, I noticed a door at one end of the closet in the master bedroom. It opened into a staircase that led to the large pantry room next to the kitchen. The door in the pantry itself was a storage rack for things like mops and brooms, which is why it went unnoticed for so long. My husband and I kept this little secret from the rest of the family. Eventually they realized something was up because we would suddenly appear in the kitchen (or vanish mysteriously). When they asked about it, I shrugged and answered, "Rabbit holes". My eldest started staking out the pantry unbeknownst to us and after a few weeks he busted me sneaking downstairs for a midnight snack. He is an incredible artist and painted the stairwell with a Alice in Wonderland meets Neo in the Matrix themed mural. I absolutely loved it.
After years of construction my secret volcano base was looking pretty sweet until a load of ninjas abseiled in through the skylight and blew the place up.
Interesting that I found this today. I bought my house Oct 2019, my house was built in 2012. I found a secret room 3 days ago! It's behind my closet, it's the same length and width as my closet (15ft long 4ft wide) there's nothing in it but it doesn't show up on the blueprints and the realtor didn't know it was there either. I'm pretty stoked about it.
Didn’t you know, people who “own businesses “ were able to take out HUGE grants during the pandemic, between that and crypto making lots of stupid people who had money More money there’s more wealth than intelligence these days by FAR.
Load More Replies... Turned the coal closet in my basement into a fish breeding/ aquaponic room when I started my business. When I sold my business I turned it into a panic room. I have a 6×6 padded room in my basement. FTW
Had 2 in my old house. Small secret storage we called the bat cave. The Keep was the large room behind a book case in the office. Made it into a panic room/pantry/gun storage. I often wonder if the new owners found them.
In my old house, we had a small bathroom behind a bookshelf. My BIL loved announcing that he was gonna go pee behind my bookshelf. In my current house, my bedroom door is a bookshelf.
