Town & Country - The Latest High-End Real Estate Amenity? The Luxury Safe Room
The Latest High-End Real Estate Amenity? The Luxury Safe Room
Disaster preparedness is a big deal to the one percent.
BY ADRIENNE GAFFNEY PUBLISHED: AUG 8, 2016
If recent media reports of building plans featuring what looks like a secure bunker on the property of Mark Zuckerberg are true, the billionaire won't be alone. As fear escalates worldwide, foreign royals, cautious executives, and Gwyneth Paltrow are among those looking for spots to ride out anything from an ISIS attack to a natural disaster.
Secure design has come a long way since hedge fund titan Bruce Kovner outfitted his historic Manhattan townhouse with a lead-lined room, built to protect him from a dirty bomb, in 2002. These days safe rooms are more five-star retreat than cinder block fallout shelter. "They may want a facility that's nuclear-proof, but they also want it to look like a Ritz-Carlton," says Lana Corbi, who, with her husband Al, runs the security firm Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments.
These days safe rooms are more five-star retreat than cinder block fallout shelter.
The Corbis' Hollywood Hills home showcases all the tools of their trade. Infrared cameras monitor the perimeter; facial recognition software allows for keyless entry; a single button can activate plumes of fog designed to throw off intruders, and a "safe core" extends the safe room concept to a suite of several rooms.
"It used to be we'd do a separate room; now we just take the entire bedroom, make that a safe room," says Tom Gaffney (no relation to this author), the founder of Gaffco Ballistics, who works with families in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Connecticut, and South Florida who routinely pay half a million dollars for his services. "In the high-end residential market, they don't expect to see a Jodie Foster–style safe room," he says. Instead, a bedroom is outfitted with bulletproof windows, ballistic fiberglass to secure doors against explosions, an air filtration unit to protect against a gas attack, and a panic button, all of which creates an area that's as impenetrable as a traditional safe room but considerably more comfortable.
"It becomes a competition at dinner parties," says Jill Kargman, writer and star of TV's Odd Mom Out and an Upper East Side native. "Who has what state-of-the-art hazmat suits, and kits where you can drink your own pee, etcetera. When I saw Showtime's Billions I died laughing that they had millions in bearer bonds just as go money," she adds, referring to funds set aside for quick and possibly permanent evacuation. "People love to say how much go money they have."
It has become a bragging right in the real estate industry, too. Sotheby's Jean Bateman is currently holding the listing for a 4,000-square- foot Dallas home that features a reinforced safe room (amenities also include an outdoor cook station, a putting green, and a four-car garage). While it's rarely the top feature on buyers' lists, "no one thinks, 'I wish that weren't here.' It's certainly a bonus," Bateman says. "Everyone has a different use for it," says James Keough, of Douglas Elliman's Hamptons office, who is currently representing a mid–seven figure Wainscott home with a panic room, "whether it's jewelry or antique guns or a renter's closet [to secure the owners' belongings when the house is rented out for the season]."
Of course, a safe room can't protect against everything. In 1999, banker Edmond Safra died in a Monaco fire when, fearing intruders, he barricaded himself in a bathroom/safe room. And security for the very wealthy isn't just structural. In 2009, Catherine Hooper started the firm Black Umbrella, which works with high-net-worth families to come up with individualized disaster survival plans and create prestocked kits of essentials. "[Our clients] know what it takes to gain, and they know how easy it is to lose," says Joel Smernoff, the company's current CEO. "They buy a lot of insurance. We're just a different kind of insurance."