Secret play room uses armoire as hidden doorway

Via Apartment Therapy: "The home's owner found the old armoire secondhand. He then hired a woodworker to take out the back and install it up against a doorway into his children's play room. The result is a simple-enough-looking armoire that opens to a hidden room of magic and play." It was designed and built by Maple Seed Renovation in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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bklynchris

@Suburban Cowboy Bwahahahahahaha!!!!!!

Yeah, um, the creepy factor here is WAY TOO HIGH. A shot of a hidden room with children’s toys just visible?!

and ANtinous-What in the HELL is a lantern waste??!!! Is that something like a lorey? Did the British version of the Chronicles say Lantern Waste, is that a poncey way of saying lamp post? Bet you’re the life of the party ; )
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Did the British version of the Chronicles say Lantern Waste
  
  As opposed to the Amharic version? The area is called Lantern Waste in the English-language books.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_Waste
  
  And I am the life of the party, since you asked.
amycamus

What a coincidence – I was just watching “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, which features a wardrobe entrance to a secret art studio.
Jason Stackhouse

I’m sad that all I see is a place to stash a kidnapped child; I’ve watched waaay too much “Criminal Minds” this week.

@ Stephan 22 Hey, neat. I’d not heard of that story, but it sounds fantastic. I’ll have to check it out…
Anonymous

Wow I am also surprised no one has commented when the kids get to be of an older age and need a place to hide their gf/bf for covert operations, this space would be Ideal!
WaylonWillie

Sweet! I wish I had the dough to hire a woodworker to take the back off of a cabinet.
Milo

I grew up in a house where the only way to get to two of the bedrooms was through a walk-in wardrobe. It looked totally normal until you turned to your right, to see a normal-size door leading into the first room.

We were disappointed when my dad cut another door into the other room a few weeks after we moved in, and when we got rid of it completely when we were teenagers. It was a strangely planned house, though!
Anonymous

I don’t think it’s a full room. It’s likely crawlspace given the angle of the walls. That would account for the color of the walls too; if a lamp with a tungsten tone is used, it would make even white walls appear to be cream or yellowish without an external natural light source.
Anonymous

Hi, I’m Gary Busey and I’d love to be the next hider in that house :)
Anonymous

There should be Ed Gorey-style fur coats hanging up in there. It’s cold in the lampost wastes.
Stefan Jones

Bad Ronald:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071186/

Wow, 1974! I saw the movie once but still recall scenes, like Ronald sneaking out to guzzle milk from the new owner’s fridge. Fantasy-obsessed Ronald was echoed in other Vance characters, particularly Alan Howard Treesong.

* * *

Yeah, secret rooms really come across badly in TV and movies. They’re where CSI characters hide their fetish gear, and pedos hide their victims.
kaffeen

Where was I when the “cool parents” were handed out at birth?
- Anonymous
  
  Now u know to be cool to your kids
chgoliz

For those who can’t afford all that this would entail, here’s a reasonable substitution:

http://www.bergfurniture.com/91_72.asp

Click on the slide show to see the details.
- Ddaub
  
  Berg Furniture is great! My kids absolutely love the stairs and the play area. I wish they made this stuff when I was a kid…
VoiceUXGuy

What a fantastic idea. I’m so doing this, and I do not now nor will I ever have kids.
Anonymous

The home owner wouldn’t happen to have been Michael Jackson would it?
rebdav

Yea, that is a very Portland kind of thing. Like the bumper sticker says, “Keep Portland Weird”. I miss that place, it is where so very many very cool people hide out.
- kaffeen
  
  That is funny. I live in Austin, Texas. We have the same bumper stickers “Keep Austin Weird”. Unfortunately, it appears to be failing miserably (read: big business).
  - MrWednesday
    
    Quote:(read: big business).Believe me corporate Muppetry applies in the U.K. too.
- Anonymous
  
  Did Portland steal that from Austin?
insatiableatheist

This would be so fun to build.
Stash room anyone?
Xenu

Does the playroom have windows? If so, it would be easy to spot the hidden room from outside.
- KremlinLaptop
  
  Looking at the photo you see natural white light — bit of an overcast day — on the walls there through the windows. Look inside and you have only this orange light from a lamp.
  
  My bets are: no windows.
Donald Petersen

I was going to hide my basement. It’s pretty small (underneath the kitchen only; the rest of the sub-ground-floor area is crawlspace), and the doorway to the basement stairs is in the kitchen at the end of the counter/cabinet area. The stairs descend 90 degrees to the right, and the wall opposite the inside of the door is the back of our front parlor’s wall, where I just installed a full-wall bookcase. The idea was I’d do the old Hidden-Doorway-In-The-Bookcase gag, then wall off the kitchen doorway and extend the countertop and cabinets so you’d never know the doorway used to be there. And I wouldn’t tell the kids about the hidden door in the bookcase. If by the time they graduated they still hadn’t found the hidden staircase, I’d disown them as incurious, unimaginative dullards.

Alas, the H.D.I.T.B. turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. I’d have made a small version (only 2 or 3 shelves high out of the whole bookcase), but my water heater and water softener are down there, so it’d be dumb to make them less accessible than they already are.

But since the house is 101 years old, there are other nooks and crannies that might make nifty little hidden rooms. I’ll have to get back to y’all…
Anonymous

This can’t possibly be to code. From the lighting inside it looks like there are no windows, and I am assuming there isn’t another door because that would ruin the illusion..
Justin

I’m doing this for my office.
Anonymous

If your house is old enough, you’ve probably already got secret rooms.

I was making scale drawings of my first floor in preparation for a kitchen remodel and found two. One of them is just a priest’s hole, though, in the wall by the cellar stairs.
thequickbrownfox

Fritzel room?

@Justin, if you put one in your office you may get a “Being John Malkovich” situation.
Anonymous

Narnia jokes in 3, 2, 1…
eyeballkid

There’s a Cuban speakeasy-style bar here in Los Angeles that uses this exact concept as its entrance. I won’t spoil it by telling everyone the name, but it’s a pretty amazing place.
moniker42

I was thinking about something almost exactly like this even today, although mine was slightly more complex. I hate to out my own secrets, even if they are just ideas, but mine involved a false wall with a painting safe. The genius being an additional passage into an entire enclosure which the wall safe is mounted in, sort of like a safe or, or at the very least a bigger safe, like a walk in safe. You’d have to make the false wall solid steel though for extra security. Kind of a fake out with the painting safe. The painting safe is for style. If you show people your painting safe to begin with as a a secret, who would suspect your second much larger safe?
Desi Mikkel

I know I’m a grown up and all that jazz, but if I have an armoire and an open doorway (that isn’t surrounded by crown molding) I might just do this anyway.

It would be fun to know you have a hidden room or hidden closet that only you know about, hiding in your house :)
pendraphen

I once worked at a library that had a wardrobe that was the doorway into the storytime room.
hadlock

Considering the creative energy put into the doorway, you’d expect something less bland than creme walls, perhaps a winter forest painted inside?
InsertFingerHere

How exactly is something like this ‘designed’ ? Cut a hole in the back of something you found at the Goodwill, using it to cover an opening in the wall.

Now a fake tree trunk with a vagina-shaped opening leading to a red silk-lined room full of hanging sausages and snakes .. there’s something designed.
- hungryjoe
  
  I think you and I went to the same design school. Weird that I didn’t immediately find work as an interior designer…
Anonymous

Narnia here I come!
technogeek

Still working on my own secret room; this is one of several approaches I’ve considered. The huge advantage is that it doesn’t require that the whole piece of furniture move.

I saw a neat variation on this suggested as the entrance to a “safe room”, back when those were in vogue. There, the opening was higher on the wall (“dive through” height rather than walk/crawl through), and the furniture which masked it was (or appeared to be) on legs, with the wall being plastered/painted above and below the opening so it looked like the door-cabinet was just resting in front of a solid wall.

The armoire shown here is on legs, though short ones; a piece of baseboard molding painted to match the rest of the room, could be installed behind it to provide a “poor man’s” version of that effect. Though the additional support added to reinforce the armoire’s floor does spoil the illusion a bit.
angelayu

Awesome!
Stefan Jones

If you can’t afford this kind of thing:

Tell the kids about the one described above. Show them the pictures.

Lock them in an ordinary wardrobe and tell them to keep looking for the secret door.

* * *

Jack Vance wrote a short story, later adapted as a TV movie, about a wacko living-in-a-fantasy-world teen. After he accidentally kills a taunting neighborhood teen girl, his overprotective mom walls off a spare bathroom for him to hide out in. At first he’s happy to live alone and paint murals of his fantasy world on the walls. Then Mom dies and Ronald has to share the house with a new family.
- EricT
  
  OOOohh Bad Ronald I remember that movie. Tuesday Movie of the week if I recall.
Brainspore

Needs a lamppost and a fawn.
Quiche de Resistance

now to fill it with fur coats
Anonymous

I agree it is super cool, but also it does look kind of grim in there– nothing fun, just a few stuffed animals, blank walls, no windows? So is it like putting your kid in a closet?? For the full effect, you need the winter forest and at least a couple boxes of legos!
Delaney

Don’t let the fire marshall know!

This is awesome. And we in Portland always consider Austin our unofficial sister city.
gandalf23

Looks like the playroom is under the stairs, so I’d guess there are no windows in there.

Neat idea, and certainly one that I have been thinking of doing in my own house, whenever I get around to building or buying one.

We built a hidden closet into my parent’s living room. Part of the bookcase pivots out and allows access to where mom keeps a goodly chunk of the Christmas stuff. It’s pretty easy to build a hidden door that opens in, but very difficult to build one that opens out but we had to do it that way in order to have a usable closet. We ended up using a removable piece of molding that attaches to the metal door frame on the hinge side with old hard drive magnets.

It’s funny, when you go to their front door you see you’ve got another five feet or so from the door to the side of the house, but when you go in there is a bookcase right there, and no one, no one at all has ever said ” hmmm… wonder where the missing four feet are? Do you have a hidden closet in there?” Even the people that know ahead of time that it exists do not grok on to where it is till we show them.
- Alex
  
  Nice Stranger In A Strange Land reference. That was a great book!
Anonymous

Is it too obvious or not PC to mention that C.S. Lewis book? You know, the one with the magic wardrobe, magic creatures, and magic circumstances?
apoxia

That is pretty awesome. Next thing I’d do is get some kind of sky light or solar tube installed to bring some natural light into the room.
DOuglas3

OK, I’ll be the party-pooper concerned that in a fire the hidden room is where the scared children will seek refuge.
- fastmovingblob
  
  That’s a good point about fire safety. VentEnterSearch featured this as a potential issues. http://www.vententersearch.com/?p=814
DarthVain

Lets just hope it doesn’t lock from the outside… -Creepy.

I remember there was some German guy with a secret room, that didn’t end too well.

I mean its great for the kid, but at some point your going to move out, and some weirdo is going to be at an open house and be like “Why, that’s exactly what I need!”…
RedShirt77

It’s also a great idea if you are concerned about a drug raid.
EricT

Holy Aslan! I so want something like that.
semiotix

Step 1: wait for the kid to hit the Narnia-reading phase of life.

Step 2: construct this wardrobe/secret room combo.

Step 3: Hire a guy in a beaver costume to sit in the room and say this: “Welcome to Narnia. As you can see, it’s a small windowless room. We apologize for any misconceptions you might have gotten from the books. C.S. Lewis is no longer affiliated with this organization. Anyway, please take a seat. I have a brief 90-minute powerpoint presentation about our beautiful Florida time-share properties, after which my manager will join us and we can discuss financing options.”
HyMinded

I can’t believe nobody here (including the owner) hasn’t seen “La Orfanata” yet. ;-)
Anonymous

This is very cool, on first take…but as a firefighter’s daughter, I want to make everyone aware that this secret room, in a house fire could equal tragedy. Please, if you have a room like this, HAVE ANOTHER DOOR THAT IS VISIBLE! And a sprinkler system in there if you can manage that. But at minimum, a door a firefighter would encounter. Otherwise they will have no idea and pass right by it. And kids hide in fires. They may go right for the “secret room” because they think it’s a safe place. Please pass this info on to anyone who has a secret room. As a mother, it scares me to think of the impications of this, even though I think it’s really, really cool, too. A second door is the answer.
Antinous / Moderator

Jeez. It’s Lantern Waste. And a faun, not a fawn.
- Brainspore
  
  OK, I’ll give you “faun” but I still say “lamppost” is legit since I was referring to the actual landmark, not the colloquial name for the surrounding territory.
nanuq

It would be an interesting place to put a panic room.
Joe in Australia

Wow, it’s almost as if Mr Tumnus could pop out and offer us some halva from the Snow Queen’s sledge!

…

OK, I’ll be good now.
- chgoliz
  
  Halva? (Or more usually: halvah)
  
  More likely to get my attention than Turkish Delight, that’s for sure.
kenahoo

If I were taking a picture of my special secret room to post on the internet for people to enjoy, I think I’d make it look better than the random toyshit all over the floor we see in this photo.
Suburbancowboy

It puts the lotion on the skin.
bklynchris

Antinous, many pardons effendi-I meant the British “publication”…jesus, see what I mean? Either way, I will go back and check my copy of TLTWATW. Lantern waste? How many people are at that party again? Again, harmless teasing on my part..
Anonymous

@Antinous #34 Thank you! I was about to implode.
Anonymous

Antinous, many pardons effendi-I meant the British “publication”…jesus, see what I mean? Either way, I will go back and check my copy of TLTWATW. Lantern waste? How many people are at that party again? Again, harmless teasing on my part..

Thus begins the rein of terror….