Secret doors
I was watching Property Ladder the other day, the show where Sarah Beeny offers expert advice to a couple of property developers which they promptly ignore. The show I was watching included a lady who was renovating a flat in a huge old manor house where the layout was complicated by the fact that in order to get from the kitchen to the dining room you had to go through a third room, effectively turning that room into a very big corridor. Sarah Beeny suggested that she put in a secret door, one disguised to look like a part of the wall or a bookshelf, so that there was access from kitchen to dining room without compromising the character of either.
I thought it sounded like a really good advice and she took the wannabe property developer to a similar place that had a secret door and it worked fabulously well. You could barely tell it was there, decorated as it was just like the rest of the wall. The idea was, predictably, dismissed out of hand.
I really rather like the idea of hidden doors. This one is rather fabulous:
Thank you Kelly Sue.
And there are companies out there that specialise in hidden doors. The aptly named Hidden Door Company has some nice ones, as does Space Dan Diego. If you want really cheesy automated hidden doorways, controlled by a James Bond-esque candlestick or maybe a fingerprint scanner, then Hidden Passageways has some very amusing ideas. These are all US companies, but I am sure there’s some in the UK too.
I definitely think that a hidden doorway has to go on my List of Things I Want In My House!
April 26th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Such a cool idea! You have to have one of those….you need to have a secret cat flap as well though!
April 27th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
[...] A secret door. Really, what’s the point of building your own house if you don’t build a secret door into it? [...]
April 27th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
In our last house, which was a fabulously rambling old thing, had a problem getting from our main bedroom into the bathroom at the heart of the house. Because of the structure of the building, we couldn’t simply put a normal door in place because there was a honking great wooden beam about 4 feet from the floor. Rather than move bedroom to a less satisfactory place, we ended up putting in a wide, low door. Not remotely secret, just very unlikely.
When we moved up to the North East, one of the things that our buyers really loved about the house was this low door. It’s not the easiest door in the world to get through, but it has integrity somehow.
Also, check out pattern 204. Secret Place, in A Pattern Language
April 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
@Plasticsnow: Ha ha ha! A secret cat flap in a secret door - that I love! I’ve been thinking about internal cat flaps lately, as a way to give cats access to rooms without having to have doors open, but that idea is so meta I love it!
@pdcawley: Oh, I love houses that have something a little quirky in them. Tiny doors or hidden little passageways or whatever - just something with a bit of character. Houses these days are so often just, well, “machines for living in” in the worst possible sense, built with no love or imagination.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
@Suw: I grew up in old houses - most spec built modern boxes seem “made out of ticky tacky” as the song has it. Apart from a few years spent when I moved in with Gill into a 60s council house, the youngest house I’ve called home is probably the one I’m sat in now, and it was built in 1826.
The thing about older houses is that they’re humane (it’s what Alexander tries to address in The Timeless Way…) where the modern spec built is impersonal and somehow pennypinching.
If we could find a decent plot at a price we could afford (ha!) Gill and I would love to build our own, but living somewhere old is the next best thing.