I recently read Gretchen Rubin's second happiness book Happier at Home and was intrigued by her idea of comissioning a miniature artwork to fit on a shelf inside her kitchen cupboard. Her family loves having a unique little world hidden in their kitchen.

Rubin is a big fan of dollhouses, birdhouses, Joseph Cornell's work, model villages and aquariums. So she commissioned a piece of art for her NYC apartment that incorporates some special elements symbolic to her family: daisies and butterflies for her daughters, blackberry bushes for her husband and bluebirds for herself. Rubin found local artist Jaqueline Schmidt to make this unique work (image 2 above). In the book Happier at Home, Rubin's daughter Eliza describes the hidden artwork to be "like Narnia inside the wardrobe." Such a lovely treat for kids and adults to have a magical world at home! Do you have any "hidden" artwork in your home?

Read more about Gretchen Rubin's happiness work on her Happiness Project website.

Happiness books by Gretchen Rubin:
• Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life
• The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

(Images: 1 and 3 are artwork by Jaqueline Schmidt. Image 2 is Gretchen Rubin's hidden kitchen artwork, from Happier at Home on Google Books.)