Dwell 2015 09

concepts
Tom Gaffney won’t tell me where he is.
We’re talking on the phone and I know he’s on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan, but he won’t give
away his exact location. Gaffney is on-site installing
a safe room—something most of us know as a “panic
room”—but revealing the address, even the street,
would defeat half the purpose of fortifying a home in
the first place. After all, if someone knows you have
a panic room, they know there’s something you’re
trying to hide or protect.
Gaffney runs a private security design firm called
Gaffco Ballistics, based out of a small town in central
Vermont. Hailing originally from County Sligo,
Ireland, Gaffney still speaks with a rolling brogue,
quickly and concisely. He is not in the business to
waste time. Gaffney explained to me that his entry
into the field came back in 1986. At the time, he was
doing work fortifying—or “hardening”—check-cashing
facilities in some of New York City’s most violent
neighborhoods. For the most part, this meant nothing
more than installing bullet-resistant glass, but it
soon graduated to building self-enclosed, inaccessible
safe rooms inside the businesses.
The safe room, of course, is by no means a modern
invention—as University of Cambridge professor of
classics Jerry Toner pointed out to me in an interview
about burglary in the ancient world—you can see
archaeological evidence of safe rooms even in the
volcanic ruins of ancient Pompeii. Indeed, urban
fortification is all but synonymous with Western history.
From castles on hills to concrete bunkers buried
six feet beneath the back garden, protective architecture
is not an anomaly; it is the rule. Perhaps precisely
because of this, the development of contemporary
panic rooms is a fascinating tale of design innovation,
wealth, occasional paranoia, and brutal necessity. It
is a story of crime, self-protection, and architectural
extremes—and it’s almost certainly not one you’ve
heard before. The first rule of having a panic room is
not to talk about having a panic room.
There are two schools of thought in modern panic
room design. One of these is well represented by
Gaffney’s firm, as well as by SAFE (“Strategically
Armored & Fortified Environments”), a Los Angeles–
based company run by the husband-and-wife team of
Al and Lana Corbi. Gaffco and SAFE both primarily
approach home fortification by means of dissimulation
and disguise. You are not meant to know you’re
in a protected space. 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.
As Lana Corbi explained to me, fortification can be
as obvious or well hidden as a client demands;
indeed, some of the most protected homes in Los
Angeles are the ones that seem not to have a single
security guard or camera in sight. These systems are
integrated into the house with a careful eye for
craftsmanship. In other words, perhaps you’ve even
been inside a Gaffco- or SAFE-hardened home; the
whole point is that you would only have known if the
owner told you.
The other school of thought in contemporary panic
room design is best represented by CitySafe, a
remarkable operation run by a Vietnam vet and former
New Jersey cop named Karl Alizade. Alizade’s
work is what you might imagine if you took the same
kind of prefab, modular approach to architectural
design so often seen in the pages of Dwell magazine,
but you added an apocalyptic dose of Mad Max and
the Global War on Terror. Alizade makes impenetrable,
easily assembled safe rooms, and he does so
using a proprietary concrete mix, a patented bolttogether
assembly system originally designed for
high-security jewelry safes and vaults, and no visible
concern for aesthetics. The results are gunmetal gray
boxes that would not look out of place in a James
Cameron film and that do not even pretend to have a
second purpose.
Alizade tests his products against an impressive, if
terrifying, range of weaponry, including .50 caliber
armor-piercing sniper rounds, rocket-propelled grenades,
and even C-4 explosives. In all cases, his safe
rooms win. Alizade’s products are designed to resist
terrorists and small armies; they will easily repel a
\Where alarms and
bulletproof glass fail, steelreinforced
doors disguised
as custom woodwork use brute
strength to stop even the most
determined burglar. Add highsecurity
locks and drill-resistant
concrete, and you have a high
bar of protection.
\Roofs are particularly vulnerable,
as they are often the
least-fortified part of a residential
structure. Gaffco Ballistics
will install saw- and bulletresistant
Kevlar plates to
thwart potential attackers.
86 SEPTEMBER 2015 DWELL