For those who can indulge, the new home must-have is the secret room: whether concealed behind an Indiana Jones-style rotating fireplace or James Bond-esque bookcase, clicking open at the selection of a book (the clue to it's double identity in the title). Read @rosiemayseed's brilliant feature online now @fthtsi "Two centuries ago, as the mob bayed for bread outside the Palace of Versailles, Marie Antoinette lay cowering in her bedchamber, waiting for her luck to change. Barefoot and brazen, she slipped into disguise and slid open a concealed door. When the mob reached her apartment a few minutes later, the queen was nowhere to be found. Such secrecy has always existed in grand houses. In Marie Antoinette’s case, only a few close confidantes would have been privy to her escape route. “These passages were placed to facilitate an easy and convenient route from the ‘public’ areas – where many authorised members of the public were allowed to enter – to the strictly ‘private’ areas,” says Canadian-American photographer Robert Polidori, who captured the Palace and its secret doorways during its renovation in the early 1980s... Arizona-based Steve Humble came to designing secret rooms as a college graduate, but his obsession with playful architecture has prevailed since boyhood, anchored in the twisting fireplace dramas of Indiana Jones and the clandestine caverns of Batman. After acquiring a ramshackle home with “a bunch of extra bedrooms” in 2004, Humble took it upon himself to create his own concealed doorway. Today he builds bespoke passageways under the banner of Creative Home Engineering for clients all over the world, with an average price tag of around $20,000."