This will be the most comfortable apocalypse ever.
Doomsday bunkers are all the rage among the rich and famous. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly developing a 5,000-square-foot bunker with living space, mechanical rooms and escape hatches at his $100 million Hawaii compound. There is. Kim Kardashian, Shaquille O’Neal and Tom Cruise are said to have built bunkers and makeshift safe rooms. Bill Gates appears to have an underground bunker under his home.
But in the Big Apple, where space is scarce and the city is vertical, preparing for the end of the world will require some serious spending and creativity.
“In an apartment, you don’t have that much space to dedicate just to a vault,” says Christopher Pollock, managing partner of luxury custom home builder Pollock & Partners.
“So we do them in the master closet, where there’s enough space to store food and water and potentially a bathroom in the closet. And the family could go in there for short periods of time. .”
In a duplex apartment on Central Park West, Pollock transformed two closets and the master bathroom into a 300-square-foot haven.
“It functioned daily as a closet and master bathroom,” he said. “But if something like a dirty bomb were to happen in New York City, the family could be caught up in it. We had special ventilation and several days’ worth of food and water storage.”
Pollock said he used closets to create safe rooms in three Upper East Side townhouses owned by financial executives.
“It’s usually a good place because there are no windows and you can store things like water and clothes,” he noted.
Douglas Elliman broker Bruce Ehrman helped an oligarch from the former Soviet republic secure a Manhattan apartment with a swanky safe because “there was a lot of controversy around him.” According to the agent, the apartment featured a vault that was set up “like a living room.” Ehrman said it was bulletproof and fully equipped with bathrooms and amenities “despite being on the 50th floor of a skyscraper.”
The late Michael Price, who ran the hedge fund MFP Investors, lived in an ultra-luxurious six-story townhouse at 20 East 78th Street, which was fully armed. He purchased the expansive mansion, located one block from Central Park, from socialite Pier Getty. This house had Panic’s room, which was like a vault, with some telephone lines and electrical wires, groceries, and his 12 television monitors to watch in all the other rooms.
This was further enhanced by a keycard-operated entry gate leading to the front entrance, which is ram-proof and bullet-proof. Additionally, according to Olshan Realty’s 2020 Luxury Market Report, there was a wall with a hidden door behind which was a storage room for storing shoes and bags. Price sold it in July 2020 for $18.8 million.
Actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, 51, reportedly added a fortified panic room to 278 West 4th Street in the West Village, which she purchased in 1998. The bulletproof space inside the third-floor master bedroom of the townhouse also doubled as a walking path. Inside the closet. She sold it in June 2005 for her $6.75 million. Years later, U.S. Sen. Bob Kelly reportedly rented the house for $20,000 a month.
Pollock responded to the client’s request for a safe room that would give the feeling of camping in the woods.
Another customer joked that there was “wine and Viagra” in the safe room.
Albert Corbi, president and founder of SAFE, a company that provides customized security systems, has installed golf and car simulators and pyrotechnics outside the safe house he designed. A chemical that is lighter than water can be sprayed on the surface of the lake and ignited.
In New York City, Kolbi said his work involves creating “hardened safe rooms or hardened safe cores, like whole floors.” What Gotham customers are most concerned about, he said, is not the apocalypse but “break-ins and break-ins and random violence.”
The cost of an effective safe room starts at about $50,000 and can exceed $1 million in some cases, Kolbi said.
At the highest level, Pollock said, safe rooms can include air filtration systems. food supply. A medical kit containing medicine. Clean, separate and dedicated water supply. Faraday cage that blocks electromagnetic fields. Underground space with thick concrete walls. secret entrance door. Backup energy sources such as generators and batteries. Luxurious finishes and accommodations.
For Pollock, at the most basic level, the company’s safe rooms typically include reinforced walls, doors, and locks made of materials like carbon fiber, steel, and cement blocks. Dedicated radio telephone. A dedicated terrestrial line that transmits audio over copper wire. alarm keypad; panic button; pepper spray; and CCTV monitor.
About 29% of American adults spent $11 billion over a 12-month period on end-of-life preparations, according to Finder’s research.
People of all socio-economic levels want safe spaces, even in New York City, said Dr. Robin Gershon, a professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health and a disaster preparedness expert.
“It’s surprising to me because these apartments aren’t big enough to store anything,” she said.
People are “trying to control fear,” Gershon continued. “Doing something gives you control over it. And when it comes to these existential threats, we have no control over them.”
