SQJ Taipei

How would your kids like to live in a house filled with puzzles, contraptions, and secret compartments which are just built into the house itself?

In our case… it wouldn’t just be my kids, but my kids’ dad too!

This article is about such a house. The parents were remodeling and asked the design firm to be sure and include a poem written for and about the family somewhere in the house… maybe in a bottle in a secret compartment.

Well… the designer (Eric Clough) heard that and went about 5 billion times further than putting a bottle in the wall somewhere.

That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter strikes the former. “I’d just read something about Einstein being inspired by a compass he’d been given as a child,” he said. The Einstein story set Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child’s mind. “I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment — that was the beginning,” he said.

The house even comes with its own book… all part of the fun.

Mystery on Fifth Avenue - NYTimes.com