As Los Angeles comes apart with soaring crime, wealthy homeowners have surged in their demand for “safe rooms” so they can be protected from potential invaders of their homes.
Dean Cryer, the vice-president of international operations at Building Consensus/Panic Room Builders, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Our influx of inquiries has increased more than 1,000 percent over the past three months. … It’s gone insane.” He added, “Hidden rooms are definitely trending right now.”
“Building Consensus/Panic Room (which consulted on the 2002 movie Panic Room) builds various safe spaces ranging in security levels from one through eight. Safe rooms at level three may be protected with Kevlar, while a level eight is encased in thick steel,” The Hollywood Reporter noted. Cryer explained, “Just the doors can be 2,000 to 3,000 pounds. And then we’re installing steel within the room. So, we’re generating up to 10,000 pounds in a room. … You could kit out a small closet for about $100,000, $150,000. And then it’s north of there. We’ve done one in London that had two rooms, full suites … and that was over a million dollars.”
To enter the rooms, biometrics such as a finger or retina scan are primarily utilized; they can be hidden behind a bookcase or hidden wall and include panic buttons that automatically call security services.
The International Association of Certified Home Inspectors writes:
In Mexico, where kidnappings are relatively common, some people use safe rooms as an alternative (or a supplement) to bodyguards. … Since the 1980s, every U.S. embassy has had a safe room with bullet-resistant glass. Perhaps the largest safe room will belong to the Sultan of Brunei. The planned 100,000-square foot room will be installed beneath his 1,788-room, 2,152,782-square foot residence.
Douglas Elliman real estate agent Greg Holcomb told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think they are not something that, in an immediate sense, increases value. … But when a buyer is interested in the house anyway, I think it does help [boost interest].”
But potential buyers of homes that have “safe rooms” don’t find out they exist until a contract has been signed, for good reason; Jon Grauman of The Agency explained, “You never know who’s potentially casing a house. The last thing you want to do is show them, ‘Here’s the panic room, and here’s how you access it.” Holcomb added, “We once had a property and an appraiser come and was measuring the home, and they could not figure out why there was this kind of dead space. … And we weren’t allowed to tell them what it was. They just had to assume it was dead space, when in fact behind a secret panel was a safe room.”
Cryer asserted, “Within the room itself, you could be in there for up to 24 hours. I mean, it depends where you are in the world. And in most of L.A., you could be waiting a couple of hours before the police get to you. … We’ve even done bunkers and tunnels. We’ve done a project out in Malibu. They wanted a secret tunnel out to the beach. So they could escape, like a secret bunker.”
Grauman concluded, “Panic rooms are just going to be one of those amenities that gets tacked on to every list of, ‘OK, every new home moving forward above x price point must have this.’”