If you're in the market

for a Batcave--or just a place to hide your stamp collection--then Steve Humble of Creative Home Engineering should be your next call. The mechanical engineer turned secret-passageway builder started his Phoenix-based company when he couldn't find anyone to build a hidden room for his home. "I thought that there would be a lot of people who would want a secret passageway in their house," he says. "So I took a gamble, quit my job and started making them."

Six years later, Humble is hiding existing rooms for an international roster of clients. "I just finished seven doors in a $50 million house for a Hollywood celebrity," Humble says. "A bunch of the doors were bulletproof."

Most of his clients hide a room with a single-width bookcase that they can install themselves in under an hour. Others opt for more elaborate packages, ranging from escape slides tucked beneath the seats of chairs to a series of hidden doors, that Humble installs in person. Door-opening mechanisms can be almost anything--a chess set, a Lysol can or a flip-up Shakespeare bust equipped with a fingerprint reader. Homeowners typically spend about $10,000 on the secret-room setup, but Creative Home Engineering offers rotating fireplaces that cost about $35,000.

Humble has no desire to know what motivates his company's secretive clients. "I don't even know where a lot of the doors go," he says. "I just ask the size of the doorway--I don't need to know what they're hiding."

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