Narnia-themed kid's playroom with through-the-wardrobe entrance

On Reddit, KelseyPolo describes a friend's awesome gift for her (presumably Narnia-obsessed) 9-year-old-daughter, which features a through-the-wardrobe entrance leading to a playroom annexed off of the bedroom sporting lovely floor-to-ceiling Narnia murals.

My friend got her 9 yr old daughter a wardrobe for her bedroom, but it's not just any old wardrobe... (imgur.com)

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Paul Renault

I have one of those too.

Except that instead of leading to Narnia, it leads to Sarnia.

For some reason, I never use it.
- Bucket
  
  A while back I was in Port Huron, MI visiting some friends. I kept making Narnia/Sarnia references. They were, for the most part, not amused.
  
  Turns out I wasn’t the first to make that reference. Who knew?
Jerril

I’m going to say something incredibly buzzkill here:

The pictures aren’t very informative, but is there a second entrance to the secret room? One that firefighters and other first-responders can find without having to peek into wardrobes and check for false back panels?

They already know to look under beds and such, don’t make them have to find secret freeking rooms to save your kids.
- Bill Walsh
  
  Oh hey it’s one of those people that won’t let people have nice things.
  
  So what the kid gets to die in a fiery hell, kids die all the time what makes any of these snowflakes special?
  - Jerril
    
    All I was wondering is if there’s a fsking door behind the photographer, fer crissakes.
    
    Nobody’s a special snowflake, not even a kid with a Narnia room.
  - http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
    
    I think its a reasonable point. Two kids died in a house fire this week in my state. The parents could hear their kids screaming as they burnt to death but they couldn’t find them.
    - sean
      
      Did they look behind the refrigerator? That’s where everything you can’t find ends up.
- http://BrianEaston.net/ Brian Easton
  
  Dying is how you really get to Narnia…
  - AnthonyC
    
    No, that’s Aslan’s Country. Further up and further in.
- Paul D
  
  I bet you would wrap your kids in cotton wool if you could get away with it.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  It would be more realistic anyway if the panel just let them outside into the woods.
- http://www.lightning-rose.com/ LightningRose
  
  I’m all in favor of every home having secret rooms and passages, but if it’s a kid’s play space, I’m with Jerril – it should have a outside exit.
jennybean42

I am making a (much smaller) space for my son behind a bookcase. that leads to an unused storage space in the attic. It is his “batcave.” And no, there is no emergency exit. But I’m also teaching my son fire safety, and he’s not allowed to sleep in there.
jennybean42

Oh, and come the zombie apocalypse we will all squeeze in there and hide.
billstewart

I had a room like that in college – no Narnia decorations, just a couch and stereo and 70s paneling. I lived in a big rambling fraternity house, and a previous occupant had once put his fist through the back wall of the closet (I assume alcohol was involved) and found an empty space. They tore out the rest of the sheetrock and found a 6×8 space which was part of the roof corner, tall enough to stand up in the middle, and finished it.
- AlexG55
  
  A friend’s room in college had a place we all called “Narnia”- it was a windowless storage room, about the size of her room, accessed through the back of the wardrobe. It was officially for storing people’s belongings when they left for the vacation (and had to empty their rooms so they could be hired out for conferences), so she had to put up with people coming in and out at certain fixed times at the start and end of each term to get their stuff- but then she had this huge extra space that she didn’t have to pay rent for.
sean

And I thought we went overboard when we made our daughter a Pee Wee Herman playhouse out of a refrigerator box.
http://twitter.com/ducchau99 duc chau

Too bad that spam comment at the beginning of the thread was removed. It was actually rather poignant with respect to the post.
http://capl.washjeff.edu/ capl

The Hotel-Orphee in Regensburg has one room in which the bathroom is only accessible through a door in the armoire. It is a fun experience to look around perplexed for the bathroom then to find it through a secret passage.
- Paul Renault
  
  So that’s where Mr. Bean went on vacation!
jackbird

I believe this playroom was already featured on the Vent Enter Search firefighting blog. Which is a truly fascinating place.
Jamie Alford

VentEnterSearch has a ton of “hidden playroom” pics and posts, though I don’t remember having seen the Narnia one specifically. These things are honestly a truck-monkey’s nightmare; there’s no way, in a smokey environment, doing a fast primary search, that I’m going to find one of these without a giant stroke of dumb luck. Kids frequently hide, rather than flee, from fire, making for wherever they feel safest and most concealed. That’s why, as another commenter mentioned, we’re trained to look under beds, in closets, and the like.

Worst part (for me, anyway)? Some kid burns to death in one of these, the searchers would know intellectually that there was nothing s/he could have done, but I and every other truck monkey I’ve talked to about it would still feel like it was our fault.
elagie

Yeah, I’m seriously not loving this — First, it feels like something an adult wants their kid to have more than something a kid would want. (Now if it had cool fake statues of fauns or a badger’s cave to read inside or even a White Witch’s sleigh bookcase or slide, or even a lamp post to climb on or SOMETHING, even just a huge stuffed lion to be Aslan…but a mural?
Meh, most kids just aren’t that into art as entertainment.

Second, I just get a creepy vibe from the whole winter thing, you know, considering in the story that it was when the evil witch ruled the land and a kid was lured away by a stranger with candy and then imprisoned?

Third…The room just doesn’t look fun in any way and the toys that are there stick out like a sore thumb — some themed storage couldn’t have been created?

And lastly, WTF are those padded-looking table things? They REALLY don’t look like they belong in a kids’ fantasy story!
- timmaguire
  
  I think the idea is great, but I’m with you on the execution. I doubt my daughter would play there. It would sit empty and piss me off every time I thought about how much work I put into it.
  
  I’m sure there’s an adult entrance–mom’s not crawling through that hole dragging a vacuum every few days. The padded tables look like keyboards with the covers on to me.