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 <strong>Dwell</strong> 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 <strong>2015</strong> DWELL
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