Latest trend in home design? Concealed doorways.

Washington and secrets go together hand in glove. Or maybe it’s more like cloak and dagger. It should be no surprise then that the D.C. area is one of the hot spots energizing the nation’s growing demand for secret doors – panels, bookcases, mirrors or artwork – that swing open to reveal a passage to another room.

The obvious purpose of a hidden door is for security - to conceal a safe room or valuables. But as pre-built, readyto-install doors become more widely available, people are adding them for aesthetics, for fun or maybe because they watched too much “Scooby-Doo.”

For D.C. resident Nicole Buell, a bookcase that concealed a doorway solved a design problem. In her 540-square-foot condo, the doors to the only bathroom were in her bedroom and the living area. The living area door left too little room for pictures or bookcases. “It just wasn’t a good use of space,” Buell said. Walling over the door was an option, “but,” she said, “I didn’t want guests to have to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom.”

The solution began with door hinges bought from Secret Doorways, a company in Sunbury, Ohio, owned by a cousin. With the help of her father, she constructed shelves and mounted them on the ball bearing hinges to create a bookcase that swings open to reveal the loo. “It’s fun to surprise my guests when they visit,” she said.

Now secret doors are going mainstream. “It has become more of a trend than we expected,” said Jeff Watchko, the interior door buyer for Home Depot.

Three years ago, Home Depot began to offer, online, prehung bookcase-doors from Murphy Door in Ogden, Utah. “The overall draw to the site was more than we expected,” Watchko said. “It’s very popular on the East Coast and anywhere there is a large metropolitan area.”

The Murphy doors can come pre-hung - already mounted in a frame - in standard door sizes, so it’s a simple matter to install one in a doorway.

Watchko said the popularity of the secret doors - which range from $850 to $1,750, depending on size and finish - has prompted Home Depot to introduce displays of them in several cities. “We are looking at rolling out a pilot program in select stores,” he said. “It will be the first time people can walk into a store and touch and feel a Murphy door.”

Julie Patrick of Alexandria, Virginia, added a Murphy door to the condominium unit she purchased almost a year ago. The building was constructed in 1939, and her unit had closets so small that “you had to turn jackets in sideways to get them in,” she said.

But a tiny hallway closet backed up to her bedroom closet. Opening the wall between the two gave her a closet big enough that “in a pinch,” she could dress in it. She could have closed off the hallway closet entrance, but after seeing bookcase-doors on Pinterest, “I realized this is something people do. I could do this,” she said.

She didn’t purchase through Home Depot, she said, because her closet door was not a standard size. “I realized what I needed required a special order,” she said. “The range they can do in their customization is amazing.”

She was sent wood samples to choose from. Customer service helped with design – whether to get shelves or shelves and cabinets (she went with just shelves).