The woman stepped out from the shower in her Denver home — built between 1930 and 1933 — and started to slip on the wet tile. She grabbed a towel rack for support but instead got a surprise: The rack swiveled down and clicked, activating a segment of the wall. It swung open and revealed a small, dark room. Inside was a bar, fully stocked, dusty.
She surmised that it was likely untouched since Prohibition.
The woman — not named for obvious reasons — lives near the Denver Country Club in an iconic mansion. She had discovered by accident what more people are designing by intent.
Secret rooms are only slightly newer than rooms themselves. The builders of the pyramids famously created hidden rooms and passageways and ensured their secrecy for centuries by killing the workers who built them. (Today’s contractors usually just have to sign non-disclosure agreements.) Hidden rooms and passages have long been used to protect valuables and hide crimes, such as El Chapo’s secret escape tunnel or the mansion of H.H. Holmes in Chicago.
Holmes is often considered America’s first serial killer, but he may also have achieved some sort of macabre distinction with his use of secret rooms and passages. The top floor of his hotel was a maze of hidden staircases, doors that could be opened only from the outside and trap doors that allegedly allowed Holmes to enter rooms while guests were sleeping, kill them, and send their bodies to a basement crematorium via a secret chute. He used multiple contractors to build his bizarre structure so that no single one would know what he was up to. (His story was immortalized in Erik Larsen’s 2003 book, “The Devil in the White City.”)
Today, secret rooms are enjoying a new-found appeal. Custom builders say that it’s common for wealthy clients to want secret rooms in addition to giant kitchens, indoor pools, media rooms, home gyms and 11 bathrooms. The motivations vary between fun and fear, and perhaps mask an even deeper motivation: an innate need for privacy.
“In the late 16th century, English hiding places protected Roman Catholics (Recusants) and those to be sequestered in cabinets and cupboards,” according to Elizabeth Goodenough, a professor at the University of Michigan, editor of “Secret Spaces of Childhood,” and an advocate of getting away from it all. (The spaces are called “priest holes,” and were common.) “Today, we hear the expression ‘to recuse oneself.’
“In our own country, we recall the dark places where Abolitionists hid runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad,” Goodenough wrote in an email. “Global surveillance threatens privacy even further today. Secret spaces allow adults to grow inwardly in a noisy, fragmented and chaotic environment of cellphone and computer distraction.”
Steve Humble, whose Gilbert, Ariz.-based company, Creative Home Engineering (CHE), specializes in installing hidden doors and secret passageways, said that the impetus for hidden rooms is changing. “Ten years ago, 70 percent of our customers wanted hidden rooms for fun. They wanted smoking rooms, bars, that sort of thing. Thirty percent wanted them as protection from home invasion or to store their valuables. But over the years, the motivation has shifted more to storage for valuables.”
“What people want is security and invisibility,” Humble said. “Hidden rooms protect your valuables and they’re fun. They make people feel like James Bond. But they protect your valuables in a way that a safe can’t. A big house – and a big safe or a vault door – attracts a thief. And people in these homes don’t necessarily want a big metal box on their wall. Besides, safes aren’t that secure. You can go onto You Tube and see how easy it is to crack one.”
Denver realtor Dan Polimino said that many of his clients who are looking for houses in the $2 million-plus range are attracted to ones with hidden rooms, which are a selling point. He’s sold houses with hidden rooms that owners have used as panic rooms and as places to conceal computers and servers. Some professional athletes like hidden rooms to store athletic memorabilia, he said.
Adding a hidden room to a house starts at about $10,000, Humble said (although his company is developing more affordable, do-it-yourself kits). Humble seems especially qualified to design and build secret spaces. A mechanical engineer by education, he has worked in aerospace, on medical devices and in robotics. He started CHE after he couldn’t find anyone to build a hidden passageway in a house, so he decided to build one himself.
And designing and building hidden rooms is a specialty. Humble has designed and patented a special hinge system that makes many of his company’s doors possible, allowing tiny adjustments to the door to make all the reveals absolutely perfect and that even compensate for a house settling or sagging.
Humble also has designed “really cool secret switches like wine bottles that contain a secret transmitter that causes a door to open when the bottle is twisted, or a kit for piano that will open a secret door when a certain melody is played.”
Humble said his most elaborate job involved designing a number of secret rooms for a bomb shelter. One of the 10 secret doors was big enough to drive a car through. Some doors look like bookcases, some like full-length mirrors. One included a false floor that dropped away to allow a hidden door built to withstand a nuclear blast to close. Hiding Christmas presents from the kids would be a breeze.
For secret rooms to stay secret, homeowners can’t tell anyone about them. One contractor said he had a client who waited for his adult children to go on vacation before he had a hidden room built.
But as secret as they’re supposed to be, a lot of people have stories about secret rooms. Denverite Juliet Hindahl said her grandfather lived in a house near Alameda and Downing where he discovered a secret room. Juliet herself grew up in a house with a hidden room that the family used to store canned goods. She has friends who now use 1950s-era bomb shelters as hiding places.
And while most people with secret rooms tell someone about them, not all do, as the woman in the Country Club home has attested.
It makes you want to jiggle the towel racks.
