Mystery on Fifth Avenue: Real life puzzle house

[auriond]

This is fairly old news, but I found it so cool that I just wanted to share

We already have trouble making our own virtual adventure games... but this guy made a real life adventure game!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/garden/12puzzle.html

THINGS are not as they seem in the 14th-floor apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. At first blush the family that occupies it looks to be very much of a type. The father, Steven B. Klinsky, 52, runs a private equity company; the mother, Maureen Sherry, 44, left her job as a managing director for Bear Stearns to raise their four young children (two boys and two girls); and the dog, LuLu, is a soulful Lab mix rescued from a pound in Louisiana.

They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they appear to be: an enormous ’20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post), gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic woods with unpronounceable names.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

See the photo slideshow for some examples of the puzzles.

Some of the puzzles are really quite ingenious. But I think his greatest accomplishment was being able to get a whole team to help him out... and not even all of them were paid for it! If only we could do that too 

[Darth Mandarb]

What a fascinating story.

Talk about commitment to the task at hand!

How incredible that must have been for those kids to have that experience.  Perhaps they won't be the typical rich-kids that grow up to be the millionaire-dim-wits-so-outta-touch-with-reality-it-makes-one-sick types that we all love so much.

[Oliwerko]

Real life adventure  :o

Simply marvelous. I am totally a fan of "hidden" things in buildings (secret passages and secret doors mentioned in books totally rule).

+1 good way how to spend money.

[auriond]

My favourite puzzle was the doorknockers that connected into a crank that opened a secret panel to reveal keys. Worthy of any adventure game!

And I was amused to find that the family increasingly had to resort to hints and possibly "walkthroughs"... calling up the architect 

[Snarky]

That would make a great puzzle for an adventure game (you know, one of those you play on your computer): a mysterious house is full of random and gratuitous puzzles that are practically impossible to solve... unless you realize that the architect is still around and you can just call him up and get him to explain it to you.

[TerranRich]

I like the way you think, Snarky. Red herring of sorts.