"The Latest High-End Real Estate Amenity? The Luxury Safe Room"

So much for "Would you like to see mein Klimt?" as the hot pickup line.*

From Town & Country:

Disaster preparedness is a big deal to the one percent.​

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.

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)....MORE

HT: the New York Post

*See 2012's "Would You Like to Come Up and See Mein Klimt?" (naturally):

...Here's the one Ronald (Thanks Mom)  Lauder dropped $135 mil. on:
(NYT)

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)