Humble’s most cautious clients will, when building a new house, privately designate one (concrete) room as their safe haven without telling their builders about its intended use. Steve Humble, the company’s president, says he hides secret, sometimes motorized doors behind “brick walls, fireplaces, bookcases, wood paneling, grandfather clocks, staircases that lift up and whatever else the client seen in a movie.” The cost of a single door ranges from $2,500 to $190,000 options include resistance to 50-caliber rifle fire. The entry way to a protected panic room designed by Building Consensus.Ī panic room is not a success if it induces panic on sight, says Gaffney, so the safety features must be “extremely low-key-they want it, but they don’t want to see it.” Some companies, such as Arizona-based Creative Home Engineering, make clever concealment a priority. Those haunted by the fate of Edmond Safra, the billionaire banker who died in 1999 of smoke inhalation, along with one of his nurses, inside the panic room of his Monaco penthouse from a fire apparently set by another of his nurses, will be reassured to know that modern versions come with sprinkler systems, fireproofing and a separate, filtered air supply. If you’re already secured inside, the door would remain locked until you use a “thumb turn” to release it. And if an intruder were to cut the power, entry would revert to a manual lock, with a key for the outside. Families with children often turn a kids’ bathroom or closet into a safe room. You hear your alarm, “you need to go into a room that you’re used to using on a regular basis so you don’t have to think about it, straight into the walk-in closet or the master bathroom, hit the button,” which locks the door and alerts the police. “You’re asleep at 3 o’clock in the morning,” says Gaffney. Rooms are accessed by fingerprint reader or facial recognition-ease and speed are crucial in an emergency. A popular option is a hidden gun safe in the back of the door. His security windows start at $3,000, his doors at $10,000, “and they’ll go to infinity and beyond,” he adds. Vranicar coats his panic rooms in a bulletproof concrete called BallistiCrete, which is applied like plaster. “You can shoot at it all day long and you’re not going to get in there,” Rigdon says. “In the type of residence we’re working in, they can be 1,000 square feet.” The room itself-walls, doors and windows-will be blast-resistant and impervious to ballistics and forced entry, he explains: “We base the criteria on what the US government does for their embassies overseas.”īill Rigdon, CEO of Los Angeles-based Building Consensus, whose panic rooms start at $50,000 and go up to more than $1 million depending on the specs, makes his doors out of AR500 armor plate, used in bank vaults and by the military. “It tends to be her walk-in closet,” which he says can double as a vault for jewelry, guns and art and a place to shelter in case of home intrusion. The new generation of panic rooms are usually multipurpose, says Tom Gaffney, president of Gaffco Ballistics, based in Vermont. That’s not the case anymore.” Demand is roughly four times higher than it was pre-2020, he says, and requests are increasingly elaborate. “In order to be our client, you had to be really, really paranoid and you had to be really, really wealthy. “We used to be the niche within a niche,” says David Vranicar, managing partner at Fortified & Ballistic Security, in Miami. Today, purveyors of concealed armor-plated doors say demand has moved decisively from the fringes into the mainstream. Carter, who asked that we not use his real name because of security concerns (of course), built his six years ago, when custom bunkers were still uncommon outside of celebrity compounds and doomsday cults. Peace of mind is what panic-room manufacturers sell. This $11 Million Vintage Bel Air Home Comes With an Impressive Hollywood PedigreeĪdam Carter, owner of the house and its hidden internal refuge, describes himself as “a very ordinary, nondescript 58-year-old, with a family, working from home.” A marketing consultant from the Southwest, Carter has “valuable possessions” to protect, but not “bars of gold or stock certificates.” Instead, he wants to ensure that his wife and children “can get someplace safe where there is literally no way that anybody can force entry,” he says. Now It Can Be Yours for $5.4 Millionįit for a King? Elvis Presley’s Mink Coat Sells for Over $160,000 at Auction This New Jersey Mansion Is Wrapped in Rolls of Hermès Wallpaper.
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