‘I think it was a childhood’s dream, when I always wanted to be in a really bad neighborhood, and there would be a wall, and there would be a door. And you would open the door through some fairytale – this was tiny childhood – and there would be a long corridor, with nothing, very little, and then you would arrive in paradise,” the now octogenarian interior designer Eleanor Ambos told The New York Times back in 2006.
She was talking about her hip, refurbished factory in Long Island City, Queens, that is back in the news recently because she has become the star of a namesake documentary that was a hit at South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas music, film and interactive festival. Ambos proves that you’re never too old to weave the fabric of fairytales into your home life.
Now you see it now you don’t. While the secret space is not new it has found a new lease of life with design blogs buzzing with inspiring ideas. From the secret chambers discovered within the pyramids at Giza to the priest’s hole of Ireland’s Penal times the idea of a secret room has enthralled homeowners and kept safe people and precious objects for millennia.
In literature it was Belfast-born CS Lewis who best used the device in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in his Chronicles of Narnia series, where the children in the novel explore the mythical land of Narnia via a portal in a wardrobe in the spare bedroom.
Covert galleries It's an idea that has been much copied by decorators and those in the security game. During the Celtic Tiger years special investigator Liam A Brady designed and installed several such spaces in the homes of high net worth Irish clients. These days anyone who deals in large amounts of cash should have one, he says. The professionals he employs, architects and structural engineers, are expected to sign non-disclosure documents if they get the job. Other clients on Brady's books have used his services to construct secure and very covert galleries for expensive art and book collections.
This interior add-on is not cheap. Prices start upwards of €50,0000, Brady says. While Brady won’t reveal his clients, there are many Narnia-esque type solutions at US-based Creative Home Engineering whose clients include A-list celebrities, athletes, kings and heads of state. These devices include an armoire with a secret back door, secret panels in a fireplace that slide open to reveal a room to its rear, built-in shelving units that break open to a double door wide space. They even have a staircase lift to expose a James Bond villain-worthy hideaway.
While 70 per cent of the spaces Creative Home Engineering design are for “a high-security purpose such as a panic room or vault room”, they also build fun spaces such as secret theatre rooms, kid’s play rooms and additional storage, chief executive Steve Humble says.
The purpose of the secret room at the holiday cabin at North Lake Wenatchee, in Washington State (pictured, right), was to “provide overflow sleeping space and a media room”, without undermining the “cabin’s cosy feel,” John DeForest, the principal at Seattle-based DeForest Architects explains. A handmade solid maple bookcase swings out to reveal 24sq metres of additional space.
Clutter out of sight For New Jersey-based interior designer Cory Connor, her secret mud room has a much more prosaic purpose. It was about putting the clutter of her two children, ages eight and 10, out of sight, she says. Situated off the hall, it is obscured by what looks like panelling where there are coat hooks for the kids' coats and tin panniers below for their everyday shoes.
Pull open the doors and you find five and half square metres of space inspired not by fantasy literature but by a need “not to be suffocated by our stuff”. Storage baskets stow away baseballs and soccer balls, boxes house gloves and mitts and shelving finds a home for special occasion tableware. “Now there is a place for everything,” she says.
In Penal times in Ireland the priest’s hole became an architectural necessity. Ken Healy discovered one at Barberstown Castle when he bought the building from musician Eric Clapton in 1987. More of an escape hatch it linked the castle with St Bridget’s Catholic Church in Straffan via a secret passage. While it can be viewed on request it is situated under the bar service area in the Victorian wing of the Castle. Secret room fans will be disappointed to discover that it now houses electrical cables and that the tunnel is no longer accessible as sections of it have caved in.
Behind the bookcase If you don't have the room for a secret space you can connect one room in the house with another using a jib door, an exit that is made flush with one wall, with no door handle or architraving and is often wallpapered in the same paper as the surrounding wall to disguise it.
It’s something decorator Colin Orchard, the London-based Scottish designer, discovered at Ballyfin Demesne when he began its refurbishment. In Ballyfinn the portal is a period style bookcase filled with false book spines, made to match the book-bindings that fill the library walls. The door leads through to a sensitively restored Turner conservatory and was in situ when Orchard first viewed the house.
“It is a medium used mainly for visual reasons when you don’t want any more doors in a room breaking up the space or breaking up the symmetry of that space,” Orchard says. For something similar he recommends fauxbooks.co.uk. As a design feature it can also work well in contemporary homes.
coryconnordesigns.com deforestarchitects.com liamabrady.ie
