Operating theaters, bowling alleys and home cinemas: Not happy with safe rooms, the super-rich are building luxury fortresses

Few things appear to soothe the existential anxieties of the super rich like a bunker designed to withstand anything short of total nuclear Armageddon.

Few things appear to soothe the existential anxieties of the super-rich like a bunker designed to withstand anything short of total nuclear Armageddon. Yet it’s no longer enough for the security-conscious billionaire to stick an impenetrable safe room in the basement where it might sit empty forever. In today’s uber-prime properties, bunkers have gone seriously upmarket and hi-tech, in some cases growing to the extent that whole homes are becoming 21st century fortresses. “We’ve seen a lot more of a focus on entertainment,” said Al Corbi, who has been at the forefront of secure luxury for 50 years as the president and founder of SAFE (Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments), based in Virginia, in the US. “If you’re going to be able to survive underground, we want you to be having fun.” Corbi, who helped secure a 27-floor private home in Mumbai for the billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani (whose son Anant recently made headlines with his lavish wedding celebrations), is currently working on a sprawling house on a 200-acre wooded plot, at an undisclosed location in the US (he is understandably tight-lipped about many aspects of his work). The house itself, Corbi said in an interview via Zoom, is ultra-secure with the blast-proof doors, unbreakable windows and biometric door-entry systems. Then there’s the 30-foot-deep moat with a swing bridge, the water canons capable of taking out helicopters, drones or skydivers, and the film of flammable liquid that can be automatically deployed across the surface of the artificial lake and ignited to create a defensive ring of fire. “Look at medieval times, a moat is one of the greatest deterrents,” said Corbi. “But they didn’t have jet skis back then.” Corbi’s client, a business mogul and avid watersports fan, saw a dual use for his moat and plans to use it as a race track for his alpha pals, too. The very wealthy have always been targets, whether from intruders, kidnappers, or assassins. Now fears have grown to include “eat the rich” anti-capitalist activists, extreme weather caused by climate change, terrorists, unforeseen apocalyptic events — and a perennial pandemic threat that was made all too real in 2020.