For Secret Rooms, 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.
Residential contractor here. A client once asked that I add a 4×6 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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 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 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 5×10 feet on the inside, not too shabby at all. Was a pretty fun build, albeit somewhat challenging. Edit: spelling/words.
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
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.
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)
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.
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?
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