No longer objects of romantic yearning or political intrigue, modern hidden-compartment furniture is often designed with one particular, and very lucrative, paranoia in mind: guns. As a result, the hidden compartment furniture industry has adapted. Today, the things we deem valuable and worth hiding have changed over time as money, documents, and identity have become digitized - hidden in a different way behind strings of passwords and the opacity afforded by far-off server farms. In the past, the mundanity of hidden-compartment furniture has offered stability despite the unpredictable, providing security in the face of political upheaval and the untrustworthiness of institutional banking. “That there is nothing about it that seems suspicious in any way, that would give you a reason to think it was anything other than what you were looking at.” “The overriding element.is the illusion of normalcy,” he said. For Jackson, whose background as a magician informed much of his work as a furniture designer, the value of hidden compartments lies in their ordinariness. By smuggling them home periodically, he was able to preserve these images and thus parts of history that would otherwise be lost to more dominant narratives.īeyond the romance of hidden compartments, there is a pragmatism to the false bottom drawer. On the other side of the world, in a different era, the photographer Li Zhensheng, one of the most thorough documentarians of China’s Cultural Revolution, stored “negative” negatives of the photographs he took as a propaganda photographer in the secret compartment of his work desk. Hidden-compartment furnishings held a special appeal for women in the past, as the Denver Sun reported in1905: such furniture is well-suited for the woman who does not have the “fireproof deposit safe or a safe place in the office” to store secret documents like her male counterpart. What we hide, and from whom, is often a way to trace shifting power dynamics in different contexts. When World War II ended and her family was called back to Taiwan, she hid wedding diamonds in toothpaste tubes in order to sneak what valuables she had past corrupt border guards, providing her family with a safety net in a situation in which they would otherwise have to start again with nothing. She had learned of the advantages of hidden compartments through decades of experience in Vietnam, when her children were tied up and held at gunpoint during a robbery, she was able to give up only a few valuables, the rest having been cleverly concealed beneath stacks of cheap dishes and silverware in the china cabinet. My first encounter with hidden-compartment furniture was a small cupboard with false-bottom drawers in which my great-grandmother stashed jewelry and valuables. The hidden-compartment desk made for John Lennon Photo care of Dakota Jackson It holds a sense of wonder in that.whatever you put in in this object is for safekeeping.” “If you can keep a secret, let’s say and nobody was to know that whatever the object you possess has additional elements to it like hidden compartments, then it’s really personal. “It’s interesting, people have different things they want to hide,” said Jackson. The love charm worked - the woman was Yoko Ono and her ex-lover, John Lennon.įrom Michaelangelo’s secret hiding room beneath the Medici Chapel to the various false-bottom contraptions that riddled teen sleuth Nancy Drew’s investigations, hidden compartments have long been featured in literature and historical half-truths as a way of revealing what people least want the outside world to see. “In a way, it was a sort of love charm, a way of saying never forget me,” Jackson told me recently over the phone. About 40 years later, when the woman brought the desk back to Jackson for restoration, she revealed that she had placed a photograph of herself in one of the compartments, so that her ex-lover, who was living with someone else at the time, could keep a piece of their relationship, hidden away. One of these compartments involved a Chinese puzzle component, requiring the recipient to engage in a sort of game, rearranging the pieces in a specific formation in order to access a hidden drawer. The desk, intended by the client to be a “mystical object,” was to contain multiple hidden compartments. In 1974, New York-based furniture designer Dakota Jackson was commissioned by a client to design a desk as a birthday present for the woman’s ex-lover.

Hidden compartments