What we hide, and from whom, is often a way to trace shifting power dynamics in different contexts. When World War II ended and her family was called back to Taiwan, she hid wedding diamonds in toothpaste tubes in order to sneak what valuables she had past corrupt border guards, providing her family with a safety net in a situation in which they would otherwise have to start again with nothing. She had learned of the advantages of hidden compartments through decades of experience in Vietnam, when her children were tied up and held at gunpoint during a robbery, she was able to give up only a few valuables, the rest having been cleverly concealed beneath stacks of cheap dishes and silverware in the china cabinet. My first encounter with hidden-compartment furniture was a small cupboard with false-bottom drawers in which my great-grandmother stashed jewelry and valuables. The hidden-compartment desk made for John Lennon Photo care of Dakota Jackson It holds a sense of wonder in that.whatever you put in in this object is for safekeeping.” “If you can keep a secret, let’s say and nobody was to know that whatever the object you possess has additional elements to it like hidden compartments, then it’s really personal. “It’s interesting, people have different things they want to hide,” said Jackson. The love charm worked - the woman was Yoko Ono and her ex-lover, John Lennon.įrom Michaelangelo’s secret hiding room beneath the Medici Chapel to the various false-bottom contraptions that riddled teen sleuth Nancy Drew’s investigations, hidden compartments have long been featured in literature and historical half-truths as a way of revealing what people least want the outside world to see. “In a way, it was a sort of love charm, a way of saying never forget me,” Jackson told me recently over the phone. About 40 years later, when the woman brought the desk back to Jackson for restoration, she revealed that she had placed a photograph of herself in one of the compartments, so that her ex-lover, who was living with someone else at the time, could keep a piece of their relationship, hidden away. One of these compartments involved a Chinese puzzle component, requiring the recipient to engage in a sort of game, rearranging the pieces in a specific formation in order to access a hidden drawer. The desk, intended by the client to be a “mystical object,” was to contain multiple hidden compartments. In 1974, New York-based furniture designer Dakota Jackson was commissioned by a client to design a desk as a birthday present for the woman’s ex-lover.