Safe rooms or "panic rooms" are becoming a hot trend in New York's luxury housing market.
It seems that many homeowners took inspiration from Jodie Foster's 2002 movie, "The Panic Room," wherein her character unwitting bought a house with a safe room, states the site Luxury Listings NYC. In the movie, the room came in handy when intruders broke into Foster's home. In real life, homeowners have started to explore adding this amenity into their homes. Gaffco Ballistics, a Vermont based private security firm, is just one of the companies that offers construction and the security set-up of a panic room. According to Gaffco Ballistics' Tom Gaffney, today's panic rooms may either look very cozy or exude a more luxurious ambiance as compared to a typical safe room.
Gaffney said, "Fine woodwork, exacting architectural details, and precise paint jobs deliberately cloak the fact that the room you're standing in is certainly bulletproof; it is all but guaranteed to be on 24-hour video surveillance; and it is most likely hooked up to a biometric interface for remotely triggering automatic locks and security shutters."
The Gaffco Ballistics' executive also explained that securing a home entails "dissimulation and disguise." He stated that the panic rooms are designed in a way wherein a homeowner is "not meant to know [that they're] in a protected space."
During an earlier interview with the New York Times in May, Gaffney also shared that his business had more than doubled over the past decade. The influx of request for home security systems, that reportedly cost around five to six figures, came after the 9/11 attacks. He mentioned that from one to two safe rooms a year, his company is now building a half dozen panic rooms.
The New York Times report also cited that spotting a safe room in a home has become difficult given the "ordinary" trappings that would typically disguise it. According to city officials, both the Department of Buildings and the Police Department doesn't have any statistics on how many safe rooms were constructed in the city or if any had ever been used.
The Times report even mentioned a few real estate properties which had safe rooms such as a triplex at Riverside Boulevard and a TriBeca townhouse owned by Alan Wilzig who is a former chief executive of the Trust Company of New Jersey. Even the late comedienne, Joan Rivers, reportedly had one in her Fifth Avenue penthouse as protection against stalkers.
