History Main / OhLookMoreRooms

A subtrope of BiggerOnTheInside. A place looks fairly normal from the outside, and possibly even when you get in, it's of a reasonable size. But there's this door in the back. Open it, and... there's a whole new section of the place, easily as big or bigger than everything you've seen so far! And look - there's a door in the back of that too, which leads to yet another new section - or worse, ''five'' doors...

* When ''ComicBook/ShadeTheChangingMan'' moved into a crack in the pavement of Times Square, it was already BiggerOnTheInside. New rooms appeared as the story required, and his son George spend months touring them.

** Death's Domain in. The initial hallway is intimidating enough, but several of the rooms along it open up into cavernous chambers filled with books or hourglasses. The "normal" rooms are tiny islands in a sea of empty floor; some people only see the islands, and don't have to walk the intervening distance.

* ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves''. The [[color:blue:house]] on Ash Tree Lane is this, having doors that open from the normal part of the [[color:blue:house]] to a seemingly never-ending sequence of cold, colorless rooms, hallways, and stairs, just like a ClownCarBase.
* The Room Of Requirement in ''Literature/HarryPotter''.
* Lady Door's house in ''Literature/{{Neverwhere}}''. It's got a nearly-infinite number of rooms, scattered across all of space and time. There's no need for a physical connection between them, as her family has the ability to open portals by touching anything that opens and some things that normally don't.
* John De Chancie's ''Literature/CastlePerilous'' series features Castle Perilous, a castle containing portals to 144,000 different universes.
* Morwen's cottage in the ''Literature/EnchantedForestChronicles'' appears small on the inside, but has a door that leads to a different room every time it's opened. Morwen's narration identifies four specific rooms (a library, a study, a magic workshop and a storage room) and "several" guest rooms, and notes that she can still add at least three or four more rooms before she'd have to add a second door. The door and its rooms weren't an easy project, taking considerable time and effort, but she considers it to have been more than worth every minute.
* The Godmothers hut in Creator/MercedesLackey's ''[[Literature/TalesOfTheFiveHundredKingdoms The Fairy Godmother]]'' looks like a normal cottage in the woods even from the first few rooms. Then you realize that there really shouldn't be room for two stories, a big kitchen, a pantry, a library, and several other rooms. Then, later in the book, Godmother Elena reveals the true nature of the totally not just a house. It's simply magic.
* The titular ''Literature/HouseOfManyWays'' follows the trope description almost to a T, but the door at the back is actually the door in the middle. What starts out as a house with two rooms and one inside door turns out to have two rooms, a dark hallway, and another hallway with bedrooms and a washroom, ''then'' is eventually revealed to contain part of the brownies-by-any-other-name's underground caves and [[spoiler:the entirety of the indoors of the royal castle a two-hour walk away]].
* Creator/CharlesDeLint's Tampson House in ''Literature/{{Moonheart}}'' and ''Spiritwalk'' is a good example. It's a mansion that takes up a city block, but looks like a series of townhouses from the outside. That's without going into how one can reach multiple spirit worlds from within it.

* The House of the Undying in ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'', which deliberately invokes {{Bizarrchitecture}} as navigating it is part SecretTestOfCharacter and part VisionQuest. Daenerys first notices this when she finds herself climbing a large staircase, when the building she entered appeared to only be one storey high.
* "Literature/AndHeBuiltACrookedHouse" by Creator/RobertHeinlein. The house is a tesseract.
* This is true of the Edgewood house in ''Literature/LittleBigOrTheFairiesParliament'' by John Crowley. Due to the building's already-large size and complex layout, it takes a while for people to realise this, which helps with TheMasquerade.
* Devera gets stuck in a house full of these in ''[[Literature/{{Dragaera}} Vallista]]'', and Vlad must resolve what's wrong with the place before he or she can escape.

* Wiki/{{SCP|Foundation}}-[[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-167 167]], the aptly-named Infinite Labyrinth. There's also [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-184 SCP-184]], which does this to any building it's placed inside. A [[http://www.scpwiki.com/code-name-the-truth tale]] claims that the ''real'' SCP-001 [[spoiler:is SCP-184 itself, which can affect ''the entire universe'']].

* UsefulNotes/Gibraltar has a massive ElaborateUndergroundBase hidden below, built by the British army with many rooms still top secret or just lost to the passage of time. There was long rumoured to be a "stay behind cave" that during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII a small group of people would rely ship movements if The Rock ever got captured but it was never discovered. Over fifty years later (1997) cavers where exploring a well surveryed section but felt a strange breeze and, upon removing some metal sheeting, found a bricked up room and a small complex of rooms with lookoutposts. Rumours abound there are still more rooms to be found hidden just below the surface.

* ''Literature/TheRestaurantOfManyOrders'' is a series of room, each one giving out an instruction. The instructions get weirder as one progressses: the first rooms tell you to leave behind valuables and belongings, then the next tell you to take off your clothes, [[spoiler:then the next tell you to season yourself. Upon making it to the final room, congratulations, you realize you have been instructed to prepare yourself as food and are about to be killed and eaten by the owners.]]

* Devera gets stuck in one in ''[[Literature/{{Dragaera}} Vallista]]'', and Vlad must resolve what's wrong with the place before he or she can escape.

[[folder: Western Animation]]

* Wiki/{{SCP|Foundation}}-[[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-167 167]], the aptly-named Infinite Labyrinth. There's also [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-184 SCP-184]], which does this to any building it's placed inside.

* This is true of the Edgewood house in ''Literature/LittleBig'' by John Crowley. Due to the building's already-large size and complex layout, it takes a while for people to realise this, which helps with TheMasquerade.

* ''Literature/TheNeverendingStory'' features a palace of doors which can lead to any portal in any world at any moment, though the entrance is constantly changing. It does work as a useful travel mechanism, though; each room has two unusual doors (like a giant zipper or a vault door), and to get to one specific place you have to go through the doors that remind you of things at your destination.

** The Unseen University library is definitely this. It extends into L-space. In ''Discworld/GuardsGuards'', we see it can even be used [[spoiler:to travel through time]]. The rest of the university also does this; in ''Discworld/TheLastContinent'', Ridcully acquires a map from the university cartographer (whom he has never met before) which looks like an exploding chrysanthemum and will probably be accurate for a few hours.

* The Classic ''ScoobyDoo'' thing where they are running from the bad guys, hiding in barrels or [[ScoobyDoobyDoors popping in and out of doors]], often uses this.

** Though they rarely show more than the console room, the TARDIS has so many rooms even the Doctor isn't sure where they all lead (except for that time where they jettisoned part of it.)

* Though they rarely bother to show it anymore, the TARDIS from ''Series/DoctorWho'' has so many rooms even the Doctor himself isn't sure where they all lead (except for that time where they jettisoned part of it. He knows that door doesn't lead anywhere anymore).
** In one story, it was revealed that lots and lots of floors in the Tardis are made from that futuristic high-tech space-age structural material - brick. There's even something in there that looks like a municipal British swimming pool, circa 1950.
** Has happened to a couple of houses in the new series, when aliens attached new rooms or floors to an existing building.

** Death's Domain in. The initial hallway is intimidating enough, but several of the rooms along it open up into cavernous chambers filled with books or hourglasses. The "normal" rooms are tiny islands in a see of empty floor; some people only see the islands, and don't have to walk the intervening distance.

** Death's Domain in. The initial hallway is intimidating enough, but several of the rooms along it open up into cavernous chambers filled with books or hourglasses.

* ''Literature/AndHeBuiltACrookedHouse'' by RobertHeinlein. The house is a tesseract.

* ''[[color:blue: House]] [[Literature/HouseOfLeaves Of Leaves]]''. The [[color:blue:house]] on Ash Tree Lane is this, having doors that open from the normal part of the [[color:blue:house]] to a seemingly never-ending sequence of cold, colorless rooms, hallways, and stairs, just like a ClownCarBase.

* This is true of the Edgewood house in ''Little, Big'' by John Crowley. Due to the building's already-large size and complex layout, it takes a while for people to realise this, which helps with TheMasquerade.

* When ''ShadeTheChangingMan'' moved into a crack in the pavement of Times Square, it was already BiggerOnTheInside. New rooms appeared as the story required, and his son George spend months touring them.

* The player's house in ''AnimalCrossing'', once you start adding on extensions.

* It's an old joke about housing in NewYorkCity that everyone is always secretly hoping they'll notice a door one day that they [[FailedASpotCheck never saw before]], and it turns out that their apartment is [[FriendsRentControl twice as big as they realized]].

* Arguably Death's Domain in ''Literature/{{Discworld}}''. The initial hallway is intimidating enough, but several of the rooms along it open up into cavernous chambers filled with books or hourglasses.

* John De Chancie's ''CastlePerilous'' series features Castle Perilous, a castle containing portals to 144,000 different universes.
* Morwen's cottage in the ''EnchantedForestChronicles'' appears small on the inside, but has a door that leads to a different room every time it's opened. Morwen's narration identifies four specific rooms (a library, a study, a magic workshop and a storage room) and "several" guest rooms, and notes that she can still add at least three or four more rooms before she'd have to add a second door. The door and its rooms weren't an easy project, taking considerable time and effort, but she considers it to have been more than worth every minute.
* The Godmothers hut in MercedesLackey's ''[[Literature/TalesOfTheFiveHundredKingdoms The Fairy Godmother]]'' looks like a normal cottage in the woods even from the first few rooms. Then you realize that there really shouldn't be room for two stories, a big kitchen, a pantry, a library, and several other rooms. Then, later in the book, Godmother Elena reveals the true nature of the totally not just a house. It's simply magic.

* The House of the Undying in ''ASongOfIceAndFire'', which deliberately invokes {{Bizarrchitecture}} as navigating it is part SecretTestOfCharacter and part VisionQuest. Daenerys first notices this when she finds herself climbing a large staircase, when the building she entered appeared to only be one storey high.
* ''AndHeBuiltACrookedHouse'' by RobertHeinlein. The house is a tesseract.

* In TheITCrowd episode ''The Red Door,'' Jen suddenly becomes curious about the titular door in the corner of the office, which hasn't been shown on screen previously. At the end of the episode another, more terrifying door is briefly shown (and never mentioned again).