So, you hire an architect and have him completely redo your enormous prewar apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. (You are enormously rich - Isn't this a great story so far?)

He finishes, you and your family move back in. It has all the nice Upper East Side touches - The 16th Century Belgian mantel, the Macassar ebony trim, all the walnut paneling. (Remember your immense wealth?)

In your new Jarrah-and-birdseye-maple custom bed, designed by your architect, a wooden trim rod comes off. A call to the architect brings only confusion - He seems aware that this would happen, and only says to put it back in its place for now, it's not needed yet. ("Not needed yet"??)

Months pass. A friend notices that the random letters laser-cut into a decorative radiator cover in your son's room ... are not random. The first word spells your son's name in a Caesar Shift cipher. (FDYDQ = Cavan. You are the sort of Upper East Side people who name their son 'Kevin,' but you spell it 'Cavan,' so that the poor wretch is doomed to spell his own name at least eight times a day, every day of his life, until finally, finally he reaches the sweet release of Death. Anyway, back to our story ...)

The cipher is a poem. Decoded, it guides you to a secret panel behind the entry hall's paneling. A leather-bound book is inside, with more clues. Solving the puzzle takes you through the lives of 40 characters in history, going back to Francis I. Two door knockers dismount and are re-assembled into a crank. Inserted into a credenza, this crank opens a secret drawer. More secret drawers and panels, each containing further bizarre clues (a chamfered magnetic cube which opens other doors, blue plastic letters that form an incomplete crossword puzzle, a hidden panel with 30 keys, and another with 30 keyholes) - Solve each step, more secret drawers and hidden compartments, more clues ... Eighteen clues in all, all hidden. (The bed's trim rod? A decorative leather strip, when removed and wrapped in a spiral around the bed's rod, revealed a clue in its own apparently random letters.)

What a story (and also what amazing woodwork). The whole mystery/scavenger hunt was built into the apartment without the knowledge of the owners, with clues constructed in prose, art, sculpture, wood, iron, glass, music, poetry - Truly amazing stuff. The slide show linked below is simply great, it shows much of the secret stuff.

Slide Show -
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/11/garden/0612-PUZZLE_index.html

Article -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/garden/12puzzle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin#

Thanks for that story miami.

Wonderful. Thanks for that.

really good read. I design stuff like this for rich clients but I never even thought of putting something as artistic and beautiful a mystery into my pieces. I may start;)

very cool story. thanks for sharing.

That's really amazing.

But, it would have been much cooler if at the end of the mystery the architect ended up killing the family.

It's also interesting that the poem cut into the radiator cover either has four errors ... or perhaps what appear to be errors were in fact just another part of the mystery? It's impossible to know without having the whole story, but for now my $ is on errors - Looks to me that they simply reversed the cipher on these four letters.

The cipher poem, with the corrected/as written letters in parentheses -

Cavan,
The archer's child;
Curiou(s/m), bright -- Your
quic(k/e) (m/g)ind pivots and
leaps like a dancer.
The key to preserving
curiou(s/m)ity's light
is to love the question
as much as the answer.

Now, I admit, I am not sure how (or if) this poem would ever guide me to the hidden panel in the entryway - Anyone see any other clue/pattern hidden in this poem ... or in the apparent errors?

thank you for sharing. very cool....

Cool story. Thanks Miami!

Very cool ideas!
I found a secret object in a house I rented during college. I moved the refrigerator and found a fried egg stuck to the wall. It had also been painted over.
Not nearly as poetic.