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'Secret passageways' serve myriad purposes
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This home’s secret room is a small room used mostly for storage — a scale and the family’s 72-hour emergency kits are tucked neatly away behind the hidden door.
Leigh Shelle Robertus, Tribune
When you think about a secret passageway, images of dark, dusty hallways veiled in mystery and intrigue typically spring to mind. But East Valley homeowners are building passageways into their homes that serve far more utilitarian purposes.
Wheneveer Louise Kircher gives the tour of her home in the Las Sendas development of east Mesa she always saves her little secret for the grande finale.
After crossing the short hallway to the master suite, she shows off her bedroom, the beautiful master bathroom, the seethrough gas fireplace and connected patio space. Then she leads her guest up a short flight of stairs to the exercise room, with gorgeous views of the Red Mountains. Coming back down the stairs she pulls from her pocket what looks like a car door remote. She stands back, presses one of the buttons and says, “And this is the secret room.”
The stair case begins to raise and below it is a another set of stairs, this one leading down to a small dark room the same size and shape as the exercise room above it.
“Watch your head,” says Kircher as she crouchees slightly and makes her way down the stairs.
The ceiling in the room is not much more than 5 feet high, so while Kircher can stand up in the room, her husband, Dennis, cannot.
Once insside, the room is not much to look at —— concrete floors, a couple of framed pictures and a few boxes and furniture pieces pushed off to one side.
She said the ideal use for the room would be to turn it into a playroom for her grandchildren someday.
“I think that would be really neat,” she says. For now, it serves as extra storage space for the family. The hidden room at the Kircher residence is really not much of a secret. “My friends tease us and say, “It’s not a secret anymore, you show it to everyone,’ ” says Kircher. “It’s really a novelty.” Secret rooms and passageways are romanticized in history and fiction with stories of people narrowly escaping danger by fleeing through a secret passage. While they’re not on the run (that we know of), there are a growing number of families living in subdivisions and communities across the East Valley who’ve built a secret room in their homes that serves a purpose much like that of the one in the Kircher residence.
Helping see these projects from concept to reality is Steve Humble, owner of Creative Home Engineering in Tempe, a company specializing in building secret rooms.
“The first rooms we did were totally integrated into the framework and electrical work in new homes,” he says. “Now a large percentage of our clients are adding this to an existing home.”
Humble can take a closet or unused room and conceal it using a number of options, from a fireplace to a bookcase or faux closet. He can build a false wall to hide a panic room or a safe that raises and lowers out of a recessed area in the wall.
He says his clients call for a variety of reasons — from wanting to buttress security in their home to just wanting to add something a little fun and unexpected. He’s been featured on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and CNBC’s “On the Money.”
The fully motorized rooms and passages Humble creates are operated by a number of options, from remotes like the one in the Kircher home, to books that when pulled from the shelf act as the trigger. He can even program the secrets to be revealed by a series of knocks on the paneling or from twisting the correct bottle of wine in a rack. Imagination is the only limit that seems to be placed on what homeowners can do. Humble has built a hydraulic system that raises and lowers a pool table in a room and is working on a chair where the seat lifts up to reveal a slide that leads to a secret room.
Kircher, a retired teacher, says she would like to build a lift in their home that covers the indoor jacuzzi and, when activated, lifts the people standing on it to the second story.
“There are windows in three directions up there,” she says. “I climbed up there on a ladder, and the view is amazing. I think it would be really neat for people to be able to go up there and look around.”
Resource
Creative Home Engineering
2215 S. 48th St., Suite F
Tempe
(602) 438-7878
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