Image courtesy of The New York Times

I will not be able to do this story justice, so I implore you to read the article here. Anyway, I will do my best. A family had bought an apartment on the Upper East Side in New York City. They had gutted it and basically gave a young architect carte blanche to design the inside. Unbeknownst to them, he basically created a home wth a game or puzzle embedded within the living space. Here’s a small excerpt from the article:

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.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.

Now…this is an inspiring story. I think this would be so amazing to create somehow. Unfortunately, I do not have the man-power or resources to create it on this scale, but it could possibly be created within one room of a house like a child’s room or a basement. Regardless, I wish I could wrap my head around connecting a multitude of different pieces together to create something on such a grand scale. That kind of thinking really takes drive, initiative, creativity, and like-minded indivduals to join with you. Alright, I’m done gushing….