A secret door leading into a secret room that only a select number of people know about can transform a normal home into a legendary house. Your secret door can open into a private speakeasy, a secluded home office, or a panic room in case of an emergency. The possibilities are limitless, and the end result can have you smiling every time you access your secret passageway.
But once you’ve figured out where your secret door will take you, the harder part is figuring out where to put your secret door. Let’s explore some of the positive and negatives to the typical secret door locations and investigate which products are must-haves when building out your secret space.
The Traditional Secret Door Spots
What’s the first place you think of when talking about a secret door’s location? Did you say a bookcase or wall? If so, chances are, you’re probably not alone.
A secret door buried within a bookcase or wall is a great choice for your secret passageway. The door will blend in seamlessly with its surrounding areas, it makes for unique options for the door handle, and can be as large or small as you want it to be.
Unfortunately, many people who install a secret door will use a bookcase or a wall. So, while your secret door is sure to be awe-inspiring, it may not be the most unique passageway in the neighborhood. If you do decide to go this route, be sure to incorporate a heavy-duty hinge like the SOSS 418 or 518 as these will be able to more easily swing your door open and closed. After all, if you’re going to incorporate a secret room into your home, don’t you want it to be done to perfection and remain a step above the others who have gone the extra mile to install one?
So, if you want your secret room to remain just that – a secret – you’ll want to consider other options sure to increase the mystery of your door’s location.
The Advanced Secret Door Spots
If you’re looking to up your secret door game, consider adding a secret passageway into some existing furniture. This can include dressers in your bedroom or wooden wardrobes that would otherwise be overlooked by the unsuspecting eye. Take note, however, that if you’re going to incorporate a secret door into a heavy piece of furniture, you’re going to need to ensure it’ll open and close without issue. For an application like this where you will have a lot of weight on the door itself, we recommend using SOSS 220H or 218H Hercules Hinges
While a secret door installed in a dresser may never be detected, it does pose some limitations. For one, the door would only be as tall as the dresser itself, which may not be tall enough or wide enough for people to enter. Secondly, the doors could become heavy to move if too many pieces of clothing are stored inside the dresser drawers.
The ‘Rarely Seen Before’ Secret Door Spots
To really secure your spot among the secret door elite, consider a secret door built into your floor.
A properly secured secret door in your floor – or a trap door – can be used as a way to escape into your basement during inclement weather or serve as the most interesting way to enter your man cave. In fact, it was a protruding hinge from the floor of a freight ship in the early 1900s that led Joe Soss to invent a secret door hinge.
As the story goes, following the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, Soss headed off to Manila where he built flat bottom boats that transferred fright from ships to docks. Following a brief stint there, he decided it was time to return home. On the voyage back, he stumbled upon a protruding cargo hold hinge on the boat’s deck and immediately thought of the idea for the invisible hinge.
So, if you don’t have your hinges hidden, you may just stumble upon the next great idea as SOSS did, but you won’t be hiding your secret door.
Unfortunately, a secret door built into your floor comes with some challenges. Lifting the door off the ground can be heavy and harder to open than a door within a bookcase that you simply push or pull back and forth. You’ll also need to build stairs, or another means to get from the floor down to your next level. These additional steps can possibly add costs to your project.
Building a secret door into your floor will pose some additional technical challenges, could slightly increase your budget, and could be more difficult to install, but you’ll feel more like a superhero when you’re entering, and isn’t that worth the extra cost?