SECRET LIFE OF HIDDEN PLACES

Sub-titled 'Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds That Made Them'. You found a key... The Labyrinth. The Sunken Manor. The Gateway to Hell-do you dare enter? This wondrous guide for the curious and the intrepid takes readers on a lushly photographed and lyrically written tour of 18 of the world's most captivating architectural mysteries. It's a global tour of the world's most amazing spaces and places including manors, palaces, tunnels, rooms, staircases, and tombs. The author's lyrical prose, accompanies by captivating photographs, transports the reader to mysterious, alluring destinations such as a mystically beautiful room made of amber last seen in a German palace during World War II, an English sunken manor build by a reclusive royal, an ancient well in Portugal constructed by the Knights Templar, and an underground bone chamber in Sweden. Each of the 19 chapters is about a place, but also a person or people whose passion and obsessions led them to create something magical and spectacular that survived, either in story or structure. Visit a chamber of skulls high in the Swiss Alps, a Japanese temple full of traps, a Parisian apartment locked and untouched since WWII, and a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Washington, DC. 304 pages, colour photographs.