If you don’t have a Narnia-themed playroom hidden behind a wardrobe, a zombie-proof shelter accessible via your kitchen island or a gun safe under your 900-pound bulletproof couch, you just aren’t living. Some of these hidden rooms, secret passageways and cleverly concealed storage spaces are probably a bit excessive, but who doesn’t wish their house contained at least one of these cool features?

Real-Life Bat Cave: Hidden Garage in San Francisco

In San Francisco, where private parking spaces are just as rare and precious as affordable housing, one house in Haight-Ashbury took the situation into their own hands in a way that wouldn’t upset the city council. The base of the Haight-Ashbury house is indistinguishable from the rest of the historical Victorian facade, but at the push of a button, it reveals a hidden four-car garage.

Narnia-Themed Playroom Hidden Behind Wardrobe

When building a new house, the parents of one particularly lucky nine-year-old girl realized there was some extra space next to her bedroom and decided to have a bit of fun with it instead of just using it as storage or sealing it up. A tiny doorway concealed in the back of a wardrobe leads to the small Narnia-themed playroom complete with a mural that stretches up onto the ceiling.

Storm Shelter Under a Kitchen Island

In some parts of the country, having a storm shelter is just as essential as having a bedroom. A company called GFS Storm Shelters came up with a brilliant way to fit one into a home – by placing it under the kitchen, with the entrance hidden under an island. While its actual usage might be a bit mundane, it’s fun to imagine it functioning as a hideaway during the zombie apocalypse or just a fun secret. Hopefully there’s another exit that leads directly outdoors in case a real tornado takes the entire house down on top of it.

Porthole to a Playroom

A circular porthole that blends right into the faux wood floor of this modern home spits you out onto a slide that curls down into a colorful playroom.

Covert Concepts: Fireplace Door & Storage

Anyone searching your home for valuables probably wouldn’t think to check the usually-decorative panels on a wooden fireplace surround, making this a pretty safe place to keep items you’d like to conceal.

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Hiding In Plain Sight 17 Secret Spaces From Safes To Pubs

Bunkers under luxury hotels, wartime factories hidden beneath fake neighborhoods and vast systems of intricately decorated tunnels just beyond humble houses are among the many incredible architectural wonders just out of sight. Often built for top-secret purposes like manufacturing weapons or housing important officials during attacks, these complex and fascinating facilities went undiscovered for decades.

America’s Top-Secret Atomic Cities

“What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.” So say posters and billboards that were once posted all over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the United States Government’s three secret cities that toiled away on The Manhattan Project: atomic bombs that would soon devastate two cities in Japan. 75,000 employees lived and worked in Oak Ridge with absolutely no idea what they were actually party to. Their town wasn’t even on the map, and visitors were restricted. They didn’t find out the exact nature of their work until the infamous atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the final stages of World War II in 1945.

Oak Ridge joined Los Alamos, New Mexico and Richland, Washington as a major research and development site producing fissionable materials for nuclear weapons. Employees brought in from other areas of the country were screened with lie detector tests. There were so many of them in this small town with a former population of just 3,000, the government had to house them in temporary huts. Hundreds of photos of life inside Oak Ridge were captured by Ed Westcott, the only government-authorized photographer during the Manhattan Project. The American Museum of Science and Energy has published them on Tumblr.

Britain’s Secret Underground City of Burlington

You’d never guess that below a charming historic market in Wiltshire, England is an entire underground city inside a system of limestone caves. And it’s not dank and primitive. Built in the 1950s to house 4,000 central Government employees during a nuclear strike, the mile-long facility with sixty miles of roadways has kitchens, laundry facilities, its own pub and even a communications hub from which the Prime Minister would have addressed the nation in the event of a real attack.

The Burlington Bunker can withstand bombs, radiation and poison gas, and was designed to sustain its inhabitants for a three-month stretch. In fact, it boasted an underground lake (now drained) to provide fresh water, and a secret rail line from London for the English Royal Family. Virtually no one knew about the existence of Burlington until 2004, when it was decommissioned – now there are photos, videos and maps available online

The Fake Washington City Hiding Boeing’s Wartime Plant

Anticipating the possibility of a direct attack on its most important facilities during World War II, Boeing didn’t want to take its chances with vast factory roofs that would be clear from the air. So at the Seattle facility known as Boeing Plant 2, the company created a surprisingly convincing form of camouflage in the form of a fake neighborhood. Blending in fairly well with its surroundings, the plant was covered in streets, trees and plywood shells of houses. A Hollywood set designer was brought in to make sure the housing development looked as realistic as possible. Boeing Plant 2 helped turn Seattle into a boomtown for technology, and the bombers built there helped win the war.

Luckily, the ploy was never tested. After the camouflage was removed, the factory sat empty and abandoned for decades before it was demolished in late 2010.

Secret Society in the Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs of Paris are mysterious enough on their own, an underground ossuary holding the remains of about six million people connecting to a larger system of tunnels throughout the city. But in 2004, they became even more intriguing as police discovered that they were in use as a hidden lair complete with an underground cinema. Using pirated electricity, the 3,000-square-foot space even had a security system mostly made up of recorded barks of guard dogs. What the cops first thought was a bomb later turned out to be a couscous maker. Once their hideout was discovered, those responsible for it came back in the night to claim their equipment, wiring and booze. Parisians wondered what secret society could possibly have been using the space, with news outlets theorizing “extreme right-wing” connections.

The truth is not quite so dramatic, though no less interesting. An anonymous group of Parisian underground explorers calling themselves LMDP built the cinema and other areas nearby over a period of 18 months starting in 1999, and screened Urbex movies for audiences of twenty to thirty people. The main point was escaping the realities above the surface, holding free events for those in the know. Read the whole story at Gizmodo.

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7 Secret Architectural Wonders Of The World

Whether they hold a cache of high-tech, Batman-style weaponry or just a quiet retreat from the kids, secret rooms can make anyone feel as if they lead a life of mystery and intrigue. A company called Creative Home Engineering designs incredible secret passage systems that are virtually undetectable, hiding private spaces behind bookcases, wine racks and ordinary-looking walls.

While many secret rooms involve replacing a regular door with a bookcase on hinges, Creative Home Engineering’s carefully designed systems contain hidden cavities with steel structural support, so they won’t begin to sag or scrape over time due to weight and humidity.

They’re also designed to blend flawlessly with the surrounding room. The key to security for any secret room, of course, is proper concealment. You could also get an optional vault door with a super heavy-duty locking system that can be integrated into your home security system. Other options include armored doors and biometric access control devices, like fingerprint scanners.

While armor-plated panic rooms with hidden surveillance aren’t exactly accessible to most of us, financially speaking, it’s fun to dream about creating an network of secret passageways in our own homes.

If you can’t afford an entire secret passageway or don’t have the space for a built-in hidden room, maybe just feeling like you have a fun secret in your house is a good enough substitute. This Secret Passageway Switch designed by Ben Light is a playful way to turn on a lamp while feeling like you’re some kind of secret agent.

(all images via: Laughing Squid)

The Secret Passageway Switch is sold as a kit which you can hook up to control your choice of electrical gadgets, including a secret door if you’re lucky enough to have one. It works just like all of those secret passageway switches you see in the movies: with the tilt of a book on your bookshelf.

Best of all, you don’t even have to damage your book to install the switch. You just fit the pull cord within the pages and set the book on the shelf as usual. When you pull the book toward you, the switch is activated, your lamp turns on, and you get to enjoy feeling like James Bond for a few seconds.

Hidden rooms and secret passageways are the stuff of legend. Only found in ancient castles and fantasy books, nobody actually has a hidden door in their house, right? Very wrong. There is now an entire industry devoted to providing the slickest, most beautiful and subtle hideaways for adults who still have the dreams, and now the cash, to make fantasy a reality.

(Images via adamsfinefurniture)

Hidden rooms used to be more like small crawlspaces, used to store illicit goods, or smuggle human cargo (for good or ill purposes), but there are no longer such limitations. While a hidden room the size of a large office might be obvious to the astute observer, let’s be honest, most people entering a house are not keeping track of dimensions.

(Images via sybarites, curiousphotos, woodweb)

Just like in the movies, these hidden doors can be opened by knocking on the wall in a certain spot, or pulling a lever cleverly disguised as a book. The only limitation is in your pocketbook, and your spouse’s patience.

(Images via hometone)

Some hidden doors are acts of interesting design more than subtlety. This designer door can easily rotate a hundred different ways, and would not be purchased by someone hoping to make their house appear like a Sherlock Holmes setting.

(Images via essentialgearguide, curiousphotos, slashgear)

One of the most famous secret doorways is the hinged bookcase designed to blend in perfectly with the rest of the library, or under the stairs. These doors are even able to hold the weight of a real set of books, minus the one that can be used to open it, of course.

(Images via curiousphotos, apartmenttherapy)

The second most famous hidden door comes straight out of the realm of fantasy; who could forget the famous dresser and passageway into the land of Narnia? Some parents have decided to make this dream a reality for their children by creating innovative doorways into secret play rooms.