While house-hunting in the Minneapolis area, the Miller family toured about 40 homes over the course of a year. One, however, stood out. It had five bedrooms and baths, a wine cellar, and an outdoor wood-burning fireplace. But the piece de resistance was an 8-foot-long tunnel tucked under a staircase in the home’s finished basement. Painted with scenes from “Alice in Wonderland,” the tunnel leads to a child-size playroom with roughly 5-foot-high ceilings. The family was sold—and so was the house, for about $2.5 million. “On the first day of school, my son told his teacher, ‘My favorite thing I got this summer was the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ house,’ ” recalls Cori Miller, 40, a psychologist. Magical and mysterious, tunnels in private homes have long bewitched homeowners with the bank accounts to build them. In older homes, typical tunnels have all the ambience of a fallout shelter since they were meant for practical purposes—a discreet way for servants to come and go, or a secret exit in case of emergencies. Now, tunnels have emerged as a unique amenity with handsome décor, as high-end builders seek to set themselves apart at a time when every house seems to have a wine cellar and media room. “In the big markets, people who are paying cash for $3 million homes want something that no one else has,” says Ron Syrnyk, an interior designer who recently designed and built a 20-foot tunnel as the entrance to a “wine cave” for speculative home in Kelowna, British Columbia, that sold for about $5 million. “It’s creating a feature that no one else has.” Home builder Andy Schrader designed the Millers’ house, which has not one but two tunnels—the Alice in Wonderland tunnel, and a 15-foot-long passageway between two of the bedrooms, accessed through child-sized doors in each room’s closet. He says the tunnels were a way to use extra space and to add “a cool feature” to help sell the property, also a spec home. “We wanted to have that ‘wow’ factor,” he says. “For parents to see the excitement on their kids’ faces” can be a powerful selling tool. It worked. The tunnels were “absolutely” one of the reasons the family bought it, says Ms. Miller of the home, which measures about 9,500 square feet. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I always wanted one of these as a kid.’” The kids—sons Cole, 8 and Dawson, 7, and 4-year-old daughter Harper—use the Alice in Wonderland space as a playroom, where they have a play kitchen and other toys, Ms. Miller says. The other tunnel connects Cole and Dawson’s bedrooms, she says. Tom Gerrard’s roughly 4-acre property in Manalapan, Fla., spans a barrier island, with the Lake Worth Lagoon on one side and the ocean on the other. But because South Ocean Boulevard bisects his property, getting to the beach meant his grandchildren and dogs had to cross the sometimes-busy road. So he applied for a permit to put a 70-foot-long tunnel under the road, a process that took about three years. When his contractors came to him with the design, they were planning to use cement culverts for the tunnel. “I said, ‘That’s ugly,’” he recalls. “I got my interior design people in there.” The tunnel he built has stucco walls with a coral-stone floor—and even a stereo-sound system. On the beach side, there is a wrought-iron gate that opens with a key, and a storm shutter automatically closes at night to keep out water and stray critters. “We’ve been through four hurricanes since I put it in, and never a drop of water in the tunnel, ever,” he says. Building the tunnel cost about $1 million and required shutting the road down for three days, he says. The home is currently listed for $29.5 million. Tunnels are also popping up in New York’s affluent Hamptons, also for practical reasons, says real-estate agent Gary DePersia of the Corcoran Group. Zoning rules on Long Island’s South Fork often prevent homeowners from building more than one house on their property, he says. But owners who want guesthouses or separate quarters for staff can get around that by constructing connecting tunnels. As long as the passageways are heated and finished, they “make it one structure in essence,” he explains. Mr. DePersia sold a Sagaponack, N.Y., spec home with such a setup in 2013 for $11.8 million. When the home’s developer, Michael Frank, purchased the 1.3-acre property, it had a 150-year-old farmhouse on it that the village of Sagaponack wanted to preserve. Mr. Frank says the village allowed him to move the historic house to a corner of the property, renovate it and make it a guesthouse. He then built a new, grander house in the center of the lot and connected the two structures by a 60-foot-long tunnel. The main house, which measures about 6,000 square feet, has a finished basement with a movie theater, a wine cellar and a gym, and the tunnel connects from there to the finished basement of the guesthouse. The tunnel, which is about 5-feet-wide, looks like any other hallway in the house, with crown molding and a tiled floor with radiant heating, Mr. Frank says. “It’s not like something from an Indiana Jones house,” Mr. DePersia says. “It looks like a hallway—it’s a very seamless connection.” The house was listed for $13.995 million at the end of 2012 and sold a few months later, Mr. Frank says. While the tunnel itself likely wasn’t a major factor in the sale of the house, it did help the property stand out, Mr. Frank says. “In the Hamptons, it’s hard to impress people,” he says. “The tunnel is kind of a cool thing.” Even historic homes with no-frills tunnels are being embraced by owners for their uniqueness. Sacha Blanchet purchased his 1920s-era home in Phoenix partly because of its distinctive 30-foot-long tunnel, which extends from the kitchen down to a wine cellar. The tunnel “was one of the parts I really loved,” says Mr. Blanchet, a 38-year-old real-estate agent at Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. “It’s very unique for Arizona—you never see that.” The Mission-style home was built around 1920, and Mr. Blanchet says he believes the tunnel is hand-dug and original to the house, though he doesn’t know what the early residents used it for. It’s possible they used it to hide alcohol during Prohibition, he says. A spiral staircase leads to the entrance to the tunnel, which ends at a 300-bottle wine cellar and a small room with a wood-burning fireplace. Another staircase leads outside. When entertaining, friends are “so amazed because nobody has seen something like that,” Mr. Blanchet says, adding that kids especially “love running through the tunnel.” Even when tunnels are totally bare bones, homeowners are charmed by them. Alison LaVigne’s home on the Severn River in Arnold, Md., looks like the sort of place that would have a secret tunnel. Built in the early 1900s, the Tudor-style brick mansion has 33 rooms and seven fireplaces, with original stained glass, woodwork and sconces. Sure enough, a 20-foot-long tunnel connects the main house to a two-level space that was once the butler’s quarters. The tunnel is accessed by a trap door in the butler’s quarters, and runs underneath a courtyard into the basement of the main house. Dr. LaVigne, a 53-year-old radiation oncologist, purchased the home about 14 years ago and converted the butler’s quarters to an office. Now that her two sons are off at college, the home is listed for $6.499 million with Day Weitzman of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, who said the former butler’s quarters would work well as a guest suite. But until the home sells, the tunnel will be put to good use. Dr. LaVigne said her younger son and his friends use the office as a hangout spot, since it has a refrigerator, two sleeper sofas and a large television. And even though the space has a separate entrance, she said, her son often eschews the doorway and instead uses the tunnel to get in and out. “They use it all the time,” she said. This article was originally published on The Wall Street Journal
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