Quick, name that cultural icon:
“Colonel Mustard committed the murder in the Conservatory with the candlestick.”
If you were able to cite the source right away, you’re doubtless a fan of “Clue,” someone who probably played the murder-mystery board game as a kid and to this day recalls the “secret passage” between the murder mansion’s Conservatory and Lounge , one of two covert escape routes from the scene of the crime.
Such passageways, along with swing-away bookshelves and secret rooms, were the stuff of childhood fantasies–the “Aha!” moment in dozens of Nancy Drew mysteries, the props for countless Three Stooges sight gags. Too bad they don’t build ’em that way any more.
In the words of phenomenal Belgian detective Hercule Poirot:
Au contraire.
They most certainly do build ’em that way. Builders and architects who specialize in high-end custom homes say that client requests for such features are not particularly unusual these days, and they say the clients have various reasons for wanting them. Some are attracted to their novelty, others are engaging in neighborhood one-upsmanship. Some view them as deadly serious refuges in the event of home invasion.
It’s surprisingly easy to find designers and builders of these spaces, known variously as “safe rooms,” “secure closets,” hidden rooms, et al. Just don’t ask the builders to name names: If their clients wanted the world to know about their hideaways, they wouldn’t bother building them at all, they say.
Which is why Michael Elizondo, firm partner at Bulear Builders, a custom firm in Plainfield, says that the secret room contained in a home that his company constructed for this fall’s Parade of Homes in Vernon Hills was not particularly typical of the genre. His point: It’s hard to consider something a secret after 16,000 people have walked through it.
“That room is more of a novelty, a room for storing things that you want to keep out of sight,” explains Elizondo of the space that’s hidden behind a bookcase within the home’s richly appointed library.
Typically, “the majority of people who want secure rooms are concerned with what to do if their security system signals an intruder,” says the builder, who adds that his company will build half a dozen houses with such features this year. “The people who really want them are saying they want to be able to go to their secure room (usually adjacent to the master bedroom) and wait for the police to arrive. Usually they have telephone lines inside.”
Elizondo says his company’s secret spaces have ranged in size from six by eight feet to the hidden room in a current project, which measures about 12 by 30 feet. Access to these spaces usually requires being able to find and properly activate a concealed button or lever.
Other builders say that their “secure closets” are just that–closets with reinforced or steel doors that are practically impervious to intruders.
“They make perfect sense in rural areas, where if you were in trouble, help might be several minutes away,” agrees Mark Downey of Goldberg Downey Architects in Lake Forest. Although Downey says his North Side and North Shore clientele hardly qualify as “rural,” they are no strangers to the secret-features concept.
“I have designed one home that isn’t built yet where, in the library, a bookcase will open up to a stair that goes to the master suite,” he explains. In another house, a passage from the study is a shortcut to the master suite. Some houses have been outfitted with “inner sanctums,” or secure rooms in the center of the house, he says.
Other spaces are not for people, but for things. Fairly common are hidden niches for jewelry or other personal effects, builders say.
“The first time I got into this was 10 years ago,” recalls builder Orren Pickell, who reckons that his Bannockburn firm has done half a dozen secret spaces. “We built a large home for an ex-police officer who had gone into another line of work. He had seen a lot of bad stuff as a policeman. He put hidden doors throughout the house–touch-panel doors with revolvers behind all of them.”
Most, though, have not been so exotic, he says. In addition to a house with a secure room, his company recently has built several homes with a feature that lacks a specific name.
“We build out over the garage–a bedroom, or in many cases it’s the master closet. We will put a door (from there) into the cold-storage area. It will have a deadbolt. You go through it and out over the garage, and there is a set of pull-down stairs that would drop into the garage. People can’t get in through the deadbolt door, but the homeowner can get out if he has to.”
Although he says he hasn’t constructed any other kinds of “escape routes,” he is aware of an arrangement where an underground tunnel connects two next-door neighbors’ houses.
The creators of these spaces have various opinions about why their clients want such features.
Obviously, some plainly crave personal security: One Chicago-area builder who asked not to be identified says he built a home with a space that was a “utility room” both on the blueprints and in reality–until after the home cleared all of the local town’s occupancy inspections.
Thereafter, the homeowner arranged for the builder to come in and convert the space into a reinforced, impenetrable “safe” room: He was determined that no public document pinpointing the location of the room would fall into the wrong hands.
“The majority of these people sincerely are concerned about home invasions,” explains builder Elizondo, whose safe rooms usually are reinforced to reduce the possibility of being pried open. “Their reasoning is that if you have a large home and somebody is coming through the front door, you’re going to buy yourself some time.”
All of the builders and architects interviewed said they’ve never heard of an instance in which their clients actually used them to protect their personal safety. Pickell says that’s beside the point: “Why do you have a life raft on a boat? Most people would never use that, either,” he suggests.
Some say that sheer novelty is a driving force.
“Everybody likes secrets and everybody likes to think their secrets are different from other people’s and that they are worth protecting,” offers Matt Power, editor in chief of Custom Builder magazine, a trade publication whose glossy pages each month feature the newest homes of the well-heeled.
“Secret doors are definitely a pretty big deal with clients these days,” he says, though the limited number of homeowners who can afford such indulgences probably would prevent him from describing them as a “trend.” Nonetheless, he reckons that he has seen just about every kind of secret space in the last few years.
“We have a lot of secret passages,” he acknowledges, adding there will be just such a passage in a showcase home currently being constructed by Palatine builder Scott Sevon for a private client who will open it up to attendees of the magazine’s annual trade show to be held in Chicago in April. Sevon’s firm, Sevvonco Inc., has created secret spaces in several homes.
But Power also has seen a number of “secret spaces” that are merely home offices, tucked away from the world. There are no doors–just access through a swing-away bookcase or innocuous-looking wall panel.
“(Hidden offices are) motivated by the need of some people to get into an environment that simulates the work environment and suggests that this person is working and can’t be disturbed. It’s a way to seal out the rest of the family and say, `I am working.’ “
Northfield architect Charles Page has designed hidden offices for clients who want to seal away the flotsam and jetsam of daily work.
“They have books and paper all over the place and they don’t want to do this work in their home library. We just finished a house where there is a secret work alcove off the library. It has a completely built-in U-shaped desk. It’s the `messy room’ ” of the house, he says.
Although the popular conception of secret rooms and passages would seem to place them as romantic fixtures of an earlier age, architectural historian Susan Benjamin says they are fairly rare, even among Chicago’s most illustrious estates.
In the course of work for her Chicago firm, Historic Certification Consultants, she has encountered a few–a secret stairway in the Peabody Mansion in Oak Brook, a tower room tucked away over servants’ quarters in a David Adler mansion in Lake Forest, another vintage Lake Forest residence with a room tucked behind a bookshelf.
She also says there was originally a passageway between two children’s rooms in the city’s Glessner mansion, removed many years ago in the course of remodeling.
“I’ve been in numerous estate houses because of my work, and it wasn’t a common situation, that I am aware of,” she says. “Of course, some of these houses are 15,000 or 20,000 square feet. It isn’t as though you’d have a hard time finding a place to hide.”
