Bill Rigdon can build you a closet that locks from the inside and has electrified door handles. He can install a device in your walls that will shoot colored pepper spray to temporarily blind intruders and stain their clothes for easy identification should they try to run. He can fortify your walk-in pantry with ballistics-grade composite to withstand nuclear fallout. He will also remind you that you will need a place to pee while riding out the end times. “I once had a Fox News reporter who had a whole plan for a basement bunker where 13, 14 people could stay for a period of time,” Rigdon, who also consulted on David Fincher’s 2002 movie Panic Room, tells me. “But there was no bathroom.” Rigdon would neither confirm nor deny the client was Roger Ailes.
Rigdon, a jovial Angeleno who also trades in yachts, armored vehicles, and art, is one of the longest-running figures in the panic-room industry, having started out 40 years ago building bunkers for Mormons in Nevada. But Rigdon’s business, like so many others in this niche market, has been booming out east in the last year or so, as New York’s wealthiest residents clamor to protect themselves in a city they see as increasingly doomed. “I’ve never been busier,” Rigdon says.
David Vranicar, who owns Fortified Ballistic Security in Florida, agrees that there’s a bit of a boom in the city right now. “People are not feeling safe the way they used to,” he tells me. “New York has gotten really busy for us lately.” Another panic-room outfitter, Steve Humble of Creative Home Engineering, saw his first bump in business here around the anti-police-violence protests that erupted in the summer of 2020. “That wave has kind of died down but it was replaced in large part by the persistent uptick in violent crime in large cities like New York.” (Violent crimes actually fell in the city last year, though assaults remain high.) New Yorkers with the means to do it are “locking down,” he says, from reinforcing a single front door in their West Village townhouses to tricking out secret cellars in their Upper East Side mansions.
The safe room has always had a certain presence in New York. In addition to roaming celebrities and billionaires, there are government officials and embassies who require these James Bond–style features in their palatial homes. (Rigdon says he signs NDAs for all his clients but was able to disclose that they include a “famous piano player from England who wears funny glasses” and “a TV host who’s very famous with a friend named Gayle,” and he once got a call from Jeffrey Epstein’s brother.) The Henry Block House, a Beaux-Arts brownstone on East 76th Street that was once owned by Grace Kelly, has a secret cellar and separate safe room. Another Beaux-Arts mansion at 854 Fifth Avenue has bulletproof windows and “a metal-padded safe room with a Faraday cage to fend off electromagnetic fields,” according to the Robb Report, because it was once home to the president of Yugoslavia. Gwyneth Paltrow was said to have had a safe room in her former West Village Greek Revival townhouse, although a spokesman later said she just “stored her clothes in it.” Now the market has expanded from the notoriously rich to the more mundane ranks of the merely ultrawealthy, Fortune 500 CEOs and the like who are non-famous but just as worried about roving home invaders, thieves, and kidnappers.
Photo: Creative Home Engineering
Photo: Creative Home Engineering
Vranicar tells me he recently outfitted an apartment in 1 Central Park West. The condo in question is on a high floor and has been reinforced with steel and ballistic doors, with facial-recognition technology that unlocks them with just a glance. (The owner can also enroll their household staff so that, at least during certain hours, their faces unlock the doors too.) Do Vranicar’s clients really believe that an angry hoard could overtake the 24-hour doorman? “Absolutely,” he says. “I hate to sound paranoid, but I don’t trust the bodyguards. I don’t trust security. I don’t trust anybody.”
I asked the appraiser Jonathan Miller, who has his eyes on homebuyer and rental data across all five boroughs, whether security measures like panic rooms are truly on the rise. “We’ve seen it in gut renovations over the last three to four years,” Miller said. “It’s like adding a jacuzzi.” Still, he sees it as a fad, and one confined to the very high end of homeowners. The idea that townhouses are not as in demand because of security concerns in New York, as the New York Post recently claimed, is “totally false,” he told me, saying that the share of the market remains consistent at around 2 percent. One luxury agent, Maria Avellaneda at Compass, who sold a bulletproof glass townhouse on the Upper East Side in 2020, said she has, however, observed more townhouse owners fortifying their doors and co-ops adding more security personnel.
Photo: Creative Home Engineering
All of which will cost you. A luxury apartment can take $1 million to fortify. The materials are pricey — and expensive to transport. (A single fortified door can weigh thousands of pounds.) Rigdon’s panic rooms, which start at $50,000, can come with bulletproof night-vision gear, food, and medical supplies. Often, clients also want space in their safe room to store their own gun collections. But this is the city, and even the ultraluxury market has a certain cap on square footage compared to, say, 100 acres in Utah. Aesthetics and historical continuity matter more here, too. Humble says New Yorkers like to keep their safe rooms looking elegant and true to their homes’ architecture. His specialty is total camouflage: a bookcase or brick wall that actually swivels into a hiding space; a high-security door that pops out of the wall of a primary-bedroom closet. He can fortify a door with bulletproof steel and cover it with the original plasterwork so that no one would ever know it’s there.
And if you can’t afford any of that? Rigdon recommends that I stock at least 30 days’ worth of freeze-dried food in my one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, in case civil war breaks out. “I work with government agencies, the people who know, and they’re worried,” he warned. It’s good for the panic-room business that the industry runs on a “better safe than sorry” philosophy — even the best bunkers, ballistic doors, and bulletproof windows in the world are, ideally, untested. “I always say, ‘It is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,’” Vranicar said.
