Better safe than sorry?

If I were ultra-rich and/or famous and/or in any way a public figure with a lot of stuff, I’d sure consider having security and maybe even a safe room in my home. Too many stalkers out there. Too many crazies. Too many robbers. Etc. I think I’d want to protect myself.

But I’d be less inclined to want to protect myself from the other sorts of threats out there, the general apocalypse ones (vs. those directed at me personally). WWIII, bio-weapons attack, tsunami taking out the East Coast. (I saw the movie. It was plenty scary.)

As I’ve written before – just a couple of years back in The Rich Are Different From You and Me – if it’s an end-of-the-world-as-we-know it scenario, I don’t want out of the path of destruction; I want in. Drop whatever it is directly on my skull.

And I’m not just saying this because I’m rounding metaphorical third and heading for home, and the truly definitive OUT of life.

Anyway, the rich really are different from you and me, in that they have a ton of dough that they can spend on whatever they damned well please. And I find it interesting to read about whatever they damned well please.

Thus, I was delighted to pick up the latest issue of 1843 (a mag that’s an extra add-on to a subscription to The Economist). Within, I found an article on Al Corbi, a panic-room+ maker.

Corbi’s firm can put together a low-end security make-over of your home for as little as $1,300. But if you want a safe room, a safe wing, a safe house, or a safe compound, well, the price goes up. Way up. Because:

These days survivors don’t just want to survive, they want to thrive. If they have concrete it’s in an urban chic sort of way. As Corbi says: “Imagine the Ritz-Carlton underground.”

Personally, I don’t need to imagine the Ritz-Carton underground or above ground.

There used to be a perfectly nice Ritz Carlton in Boston. A bit old (rich) Yankee. A bit frumpy. A bit fussy.

But my husband and I used to hang out in the bar (which was decorated with eland heads for some reason) and drink French Seventy-Fives. And occasionally we’d have an expensive, mediocre meal there, which, thanks to the cobalt blue glassware, was almost worth it.

The Ritz was a good place to see famous people, too. Like Ted Kennedy and Leonard Nimoy.

Alas, the old Ritz was sold to the Taj, and a new Ritz went up nearby.

I imagine that the new Ritz is like the other Ritzes in the chain around the country.

Years ago, I worked for a company that believed in spending its way into bankruptcy. While we were on the path, travel generally meant staying at pretty swank hotels. Like the Ritz. And, at least at that time, they all looked exactly alike. I remember being on a road trip to roll out a new offering, city- and Ritz-hopping as we rolled our way around the country.

One evening, I was in an elevator heading to my room and I went into a tiny bit of a panic.

Where was I? Was I in Cleveland? Tyson’s Corner? On the set of Groundhog Day?

So, if I did have a panic room, suite, wing…I’d prefer that it not look like the Ritz.

Not that there aren’t other ways to go:

Corbi once built a bunker that contained a simulated sky…Under that sky he will enable people whom he calls “the next Adam and Eve” to survive.

I guess the next Adam and Eve know a bit about genetics, because someone’s set up a safe village, with a staff of 50, which is a “potential human seedbank.”

Selection is rigorous: about half the staff are special ops. Most are incredibly fit – in every sense. As Corbi says, “if you’re going to have an incredibly intelligent and incredibly fit person, why wouldn’t you have them be incredibly good looking too?”

True that, but…

If I were on a plane that was about to be hijacked or otherwise terrorized, I would be more than happy to have a couple of Navy Seals as my seatmates. But if most of the survivors of whatever terrible thing befalls us are mostly Navy Seals, well, one more reason to let myself quietly out the side door of the safe-village.

When it comes to safe rooms, Corbi isn’t the only game in town.

Last November, Mansion Global (no, I don’t subscribe)

Bill Rigdon, president and CEO of Building Consensus and of Panic Room Builders in Newport Beach, California, recently created an elaborate panic room on the bottom floor of an expansive oceanfront estate in La Jolla, California.

"It includes tunnels so the two young children can escape and a door to trap the intruders," he said. "I did another project for a client on Saint Cloud Road in Bel-Air that has a tunnel to the canyon." (Source: Mansion Global)

Folks want their panic rooms to be gussied up. Pay $300K for the room itself, another $300K to furnish it.

Chris Cosban, the owner of Long Island, New York-based Covert Interiors…mentioned a panic room that is decked out like a 1920s speakeasy and another that’s in a Ralph Lauren style.

I would not want to spend a panic eternity in a space designed to look like a speakeasy or a Ralph Lauren prepster clubhouse.

$300K, by the way, is the low end of the high end.

Back to Al Corbi:

He recently finished a US$100-million "exotic protective environment" that added a 30,000-square-foot wing to a 70,000-square-foot house in the United States.

Some of the details are plenty bizarro. One safe room builder “created a safe room that featured 500 wrist watch winders for a client’s billion-dollar collection.”

Well, I suppose if you have a billion dollars worth of watches, you’d need 500 watch winders. But until I read this article, I’d never heard of a watch winder, other than the stem of a watch.

But, of course, you want to protect what you want to protect. One company “has made safes for shoes, wine, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and even cigars (a humidor was incorporated).”

I suppose the thinking here is that if you want my shoes – or my cigars – you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands.

Safe safes find homes in safe room, safe suites, and, of course, those safe villages that are springing up.

The Vivos Group’s Vivos xPoint, which is in South Dakota, has more than 575 private bunkers, each of them 2,200 square feet.

Vivos also has “communities” in Germany and South Korea. The one in Germany has a swimming pool, by the way.

These bunker communities are built to withstand nuclear war, chemical attack, weather disasters, and class warfare. You never know when the have-nots will decide they want to get their grubby little mitts on wrist watch winders.

Better safe than sorry.