Pack Rat Magazine enjoys a good chocolate covered banana at the big yellow joint.

Okay this…this is pretty cool. Try to imagine this. You’re eleven years old and your best friend is spending the night in your family’s new apartment. You’re just hanging out in your bedroom, when all of a sudden your friend jumps up and points to your radiator. “It’s your name!” he exlaims. You think he’s a wacko because while the cover to your radiator is decorated with random letters, none of them come close to spelling out your name in any kind of combination. But, your friend explains, it is a puzzle. And then before you know it, your whole home has come to life as one big riddle waiting to be solved.

Sounds exciting, right? Well check out the article “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” from yesterday’s New York Times. The Sherry-Klinsky family got exactly this kind of surprise a year after architect Eric Clough had finished renovating their new Fifth Avenue apartment. Steven Klinsky had asked Clough to put a poem he had written about his family into a bottle and bury it in the wall during renovations. Clough thought about it and did him one better. He, with the help of a battlion of friends and like-minded enthusiasts, devised an elaborate mystery without the family’s knowledge. Furniture was built with secret compartments, walls were left with hidden doors. Clough even coerced author Jonathan Safran Foer to write a novel full of clues that he hid in the wall and Canadian recording artist Kate Fenner created a special soundtrack for the home which was hidden in a secret compartment in the kitchen. There’s more, oh so much more. It seems like an Alice and Wonderland dream, that the home you thought you new actually has hundreds of small secrets right below the surface. Read the full article to find out more. Visions of sugar plums are dancing in my head after hearing this one.

Here are a few photos, but you should really go to NY Times website and get the full effect. What you see below is the radiator that son Cavan’s friend found his name in (each grate contains a poem for each child); the leather-bound novel that held the clues; the custom-built sideboard’s secret compartment; the hidden panel and pieces of a cube which, when assembled, became a sort of magnet. When the family ran the magnet over a panelled wall in the master bedroom, the panels opened, revealing the hidden poem written by Mr. Klinsky.