A panel with a secret code

It all started with an envelope addressed to Steve Klinsky, a financier who’d just purchased and renovated a sprawling, $8.5m apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

Inside that envelope, Russian doll-style, were five others – one each for Klinsky’s wife and four children. Taken together, the six letters directed the family to a secret compartment in the wall of their library that concealed a specially produced book, In These Rooms of Wood and Stone, about their new home. This lavishly illustrated manual contained stories about 40 inspirational historical figures, from the French king François I to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the heiress who first built and owned the apartment. More importantly, though, it was also crammed with clues for the family’s four children. The architect who had overseen their lavish renovation, 212Box’s Eric Clough, had not only undertaken a luxurious, back-to-the-drawing-board recreation of the property but, in the process, he had incorporated 18 different games into the fabric of the rooms, from cyphers and riddles to more secret compartments. More than just a home, the seven-bedroom, 4,200 sq ft space had been transformed into a custom-made, live-in puzzle for Cavan, now 12, Kiera, nine, Owen, seven, and Ella, five.

The riddles Clough had devised were varied. Some were simple search-and-find games, such as clue number one. This set the family the challenge of counting the salamander shapes dotted through the apartment, a nod to the royal crest of François I. But when the correct total number, 267, was applied to the cipher in clue 18, the final message was decoded (it championed inspiration and creativity, the ethos behind the entire game).

The Klinsky children with their mother, Maureen

Other puzzles, such as clue six, required Rubik’s cube-like dexterity. In this case, finding the solution involved replicas of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier’s Modular Man etched into the walls of the laundry and front hall. When a set of fiendishly complicated wooden pieces was assembled correctly and inserted into the hearts of these figures, a hidden cabinet popped open, revealing further puzzles. Still more of the teasers were as much tributes as tests; such as clue 15. One wall of Klinsky’s den was covered with veneered wood panelling; once the correct instructions were followed to apply special magnetic keys, those panels popped open to reveal an eight-line poem he’d written for, and about, his family.

Part Indiana Jones, part Architectural Digest, the Klinskys’ luxurious but offbeat home is the product of a trusting partnership between the family and Clough’s firm, 212Box. Its offices are housed in an airy, toy-festooned space overlooking the World Trade Center site and, from the models and gadgets littering the sleek interior, it is clear that this unwieldy, outlandish project was a personal passion. Clough describes the project enthusiastically. “The seed of this idea was ‘What could we implant in this apartment that will really affect the kids, not just now but 20 years down the road?’ [We could] implant the imaginative spark.”

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Enter the house of puzzles

For Clough and his team, many of them old friends from university, it was an ideal challenge – researching great historical figures, such as Einstein, and the tricks and origins of each icon’s creative flair. “It became a no-brainer, just tapping into that creativity stream,” he says. Together, the team brainstormed and plotted the narrative and personalised puzzles for the Klinksys – asking the parents for their children’s times of birth, for example, rather than just their birthdays. Though the family knew there would be puzzles in the residence, specifics of each were deliberately kept from the family, with the exception of clue 10.

This test required the family to collect odd-shaped door knockers from an interior room, assemble them into a key and insert it into the hand-made credenza in the vestibule. This resulted in two secret compartments emerging from the credenza’s innards, which contained yet more keys – for clue 11. There was good reason it was the only time the Klinskys had to be tipped off. As Clough admits, the knockers were oddly shaped and a little ugly and there was no reason to have them on interior doors. “They’re not the most beautiful but they have to turn the crank in the credenza,” he explains. “But we were very fortunate that they were so sweet and always have been.”

A door with multiple locks

It was Klinsky’s wife, Maureen Sherry, who was the driving force behind the collaboration. The couple had all but hired another architect to oversee the renovation of their newly bought apartment when Clough, tipped off about the potential of the project by a friend, called her out of the blue. Sherry says: “I said ‘Thanks but no thanks, I really have to go get my daughter and bring her to ballet school’ and he said, ‘Oh, I can be there in 10 minutes.’ And Eric had gone to the New York Public Library, where you can get a floor plan of the building, and had already drawn all over it.”

Sherry was quickly impressed by his boundless enthusiasm and off-the-wall creativity. She described working with the 212Box team as like “being in a college dorm swapping ideas”, though clearly it was an inspired match: when she and her family vacated their previous apartment they hid an MP3 player, filled with the music that they had played while nursing all four children, in a wall. (The next tenant, the film director Ron Howard, found it while renovating a year later and sent it back to them, believing it had been accidentally forgotten).

Sherry plays down the idea that the family was brave to entrust not just their aesthetic but their seven-figure budget to Clough so completely. “To me, it’s more like an installation,” she says. “Some people like to spend a lot of money on art – this was our piece of art.” Her only advice to anyone else thinking of letting Clough weave a fairy tale into their family’s apartment is stand firm on the laundry room. “The reality of a big family is lots of dirty laundry. I guess I could have used a larger laundry room more than I need a Vitruvian Man!”

Otherwise, she relishes the fact that her home is filled with artisanal pieces custom-made for the space by craftsmen who are rarely offered the chance to display the full extent of their skills. She is especially fond of the cherry blossom mural in her youngest daughter’s room: part of clue seven, it was a relatively simple graphic project. From a distance, it resembles a pink, Whistler-era mural but, in fact, the trees and blossom form a map of Central Park and its environs. Dotted over the map are tiny stick figures in all the locations where the Klinskys have lived, an additional figure added with the arrival of each child. “At the last spot on the map, where we currently live, the stick figures are putting down suitcases and their arms are up in victory like they’ve finally gotten home,” Sherry explains.

A mural that concealed a map

Of course, the fairy-tale narrative that strings the apartment’s games together is tailor-made for adaptation into films or books or a television show. JJ Abrams, who co-created the hit television series Lost and directed the recent Star Trek film, is planning a movie inspired by the apartment (but is tight-lipped as to what exactly his project will entail or even when it will begin filming). Clough himself has spent extended periods in Los Angeles over the past few months trying to line up a rival movie or even a sequence of similar choose-your-own-adventure-themed mysteries on which he would collaborate with seasoned screenwriters; a video game should appear simultaneously. And Sherry herself has used the architect’s story as the basis for her own book, Walls Within Walls, a 300-page mystery to be published by HarperCollins next year.

Clough says he’s already had a few other wealthy homeowners express interest in his replicating a custom puzzle apartment for them. But until then his oddball creativity will resurface in retail projects. He’s incorporated a similar codebreaking quirk to the new Christian Louboutin store that his firm has designed on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles (designer Louboutin was one of Clough’s first champions and has been a loyal supporter, commissioning 212Box to mastermind several outlets). He has produced 9,000 custom-made white ceramic tiles in India, each of which will be covered in symbols that will allow Louboutin loyalists, assisted by clues sent to them by text, to decode the messages and secret phrases on the wall. And the store will also have a hidden compartment, like the Klinskys’ apartment, though in this case, the full-size room will conceal the paparazzi-free privacy, and child-like thrill, of a hidden VIP room.