Hiding Places

There is a comment in the entry on Magnaverde's Imperfect Perfect Vintage Studio in Apartment Therapy's Smallest, Coolest Contest goes into great detail about where the stuff actually is:

Here, hidden storage is everywhere: family photos & summer curtains & slipcovers go in big Tupperware boxes under the daybed and the striped chair, matted artworks are behind every tall piece of furniture, rolled drawings & blueprints hide behind long curtains & inside an antique column serving as a pedestal for that Roman urn; winter gloves & scarves go in the urn itself. Out-of-season argyle socks are inside the big 193Os vases in the kitchen cabinets and electric tools & lightbulbs & extension cords are in the oven, which I've never used. Basically, if you open anything at my place, you gotta watch out, because you never know what will fall on you. Of course, I have to have an Excel locater file to keep track of where stuff is stashed because otherwise, I could hunt for days and never find things.

But the most effective way of making things disappear at my place comes from an old magicians' trick: in a room painted flat black & lit only with parchment-shaded electric candles in antique candlesticks--and I have two rooms like this--you can hide a ton of boxes under no-sheen black velvet. As long as you distract the eye by spotlighting something cool across the way, most people will never even notice that there's an elephant in the room with them.

I like the idea of stuffing gloves and scarves in an urn. It cracks me up that she has to have a database of locations, but that could also come in handy if she needs to make an insurance claim. I don't quite get her favorite trick of camouflage. Would you end up tripping over semi-visible piles of boxes, or would they be hidden away in the corners?

I was wondering if I have any unconventional hiding places like these. Mostly I just put things in closets, on shelves, and in drawers plus the ubiquitous under-bed containers. I do have a lot more shelves and drawers than normal people, and I don't just put the usual stuff in them. For example we have canned goods as well as cookbooks on the dining room bookcase.

I guess I have a coffee table cleverly disguised as a (hidden) bench on the window side of the dining room table.

At work I keep a sweater and shopping bags in the back of a filing cabinet drawer.

I have a greenish glass triangular prism bottle with a cork which I convinced myself was a good buy because I can store safety pins in there. R. uses a pretty towel bar to hang his ties and belts on. I use a rotating tie rack to hang necklaces on. Those are unconventional, but not hidden. So I can't think of anything. How about you guys?