"Panic rooms" aren't just in the movies.
If you live in a wealthy neighbourhood, a house on your block might have a high-tech bunker, a secret symbol of the level of fear among the privileged. But do these refuges even work?

Shawna Richer reports

Imagine the arrant terror if the sanctity of your own home were savagely violated - nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What would you do? For the past decade or so, the high-end security business has had an answer: Lock yourself in a secret vault hidden in your home. And now this hush-hush industry has its best advertising vehicle ever in The Panic Room, the latest Hollywood thriller from director David Fincher. Jodie Foster plays a single mother who moves into a gigantic brownstone on New York's Upper West Side. On mother and daughter's first night in the new house, three men break in. The burglars think the house was still empty, with valuables hidden inside; instead, the robbery turns into a violent home invasion.

Not to worry. The house comes with a "panic room" conveniently located off the master bedroom. This refuge from harm has a separate telephone line, ventilation system and a dozen television security monitors. The walk-in-closet-sized, concrete and steel room comes stocked with fire blankets, water and a flashlight - perfect, as the movie reveals, for signalling through a hole in the brick wall if the homeowner hasn't yet had a chance to call the phone company. This being Hollywood, things turn out mostly okay in the end. Panic rooms do exist in real life, updates on traditional storm shelters. What the security industry calls safe rooms come in all shapes and sizes, depending on how much your safety is worth. Sean O'Leary, president of Safetech Alarm Systems in Toronto, is currently building one in a 47,000-square-foot mansion in the city's wealthy Bridle Path area.

"As you imagine," O'Leary said, "the owners expect utmost confidentiality. It's a very specialized service." And for a special clientele - usually the rich and famous, who fear kidnappers, stalkers, terrorists, assassins and plain old robbers. This panic room is the first O'Leary's company has constructed, but he said that "a number of houses" in Toronto have safe rooms. But numbers don't exist. "The safety in a panic room comes in no one knowing that you have one available," O'Leary said. "It's typically, in Toronto anyway, for a higher-end client, maybe a corporate executive or someone who has dignitaries visiting." Most often built as part of a new home - retrofitting is tricky but possible - the fortress is often camouflaged behind a phony closet door or bookcase and located off the master bedroom or children's room. The one on the Bridle Path will have 12-inch-thick concrete walls, and typically the walls are reinforced with thick steel. The hidden door is heavy steel plate, bulletproof and triggered by a sensor or secret button. A panic room can cost more than $250,000 and boast plumbing, ventilation, communications, computers, room for guests, oxygen scrubbers, door controls for the rest of the house (to trap intruders) and dummy vents to confuse the bad guys should they attempt any chemical attacks. "The high-end room would be a place you could stay in longer than a few hours, maybe for days or a month," O'Leary said. "But you can build a simple room encased in concrete to run and hide in for $5,000." Thanks to the movie, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, safe rooms are being touted as the latest high-tech security item in the United States. But most cultures have a lengthy history of safe rooms such as bomb shelters and tornado cellars. Castles always came with hidden rooms, though not computerized ones. Nan Ellin is an associate professor at Arizona State University who edited Fear and Architecture, a 1997 collection of essays examining how our preoccupation with danger has shaped our landscape. She noticed the safe-room frenzy begin around the time of the Lost Angeles riots 10 years ago. "The civil uprising led to a fear that was really hard for people to define," she said. "When it's hard to identify what people are afraid of, the fear is hard to control. Fear becomes reactive and knee-jerk. And people think a safe room means they're safe. But it's really not going to protect you from all that much." "If someone is intruding, they're usually careful to make sure no one's home. Usually, they aren't after people, they're after stuff. And a safe room is almost always off the master bedroom. If you have children, there's a question of whether you would get to them and back in time." Ellin has a handful of friends with safe rooms. Not one has ever been used for its intended purpose. Often the children, giddy over its James Bond mystique, use it as a playroom.

The world's most renowned panic-room expert is Gavin de Becker, who runs his own security firm in Studio City, Calif., and has built thousands of them since the mid-1970's. A consultant on The Panic Room, de Becker has worked for the CIA, the U.S. Supreme Court, actors, musicians, athletes, police departments, the Academy Awards and presidential inaugurations, to name but a few.

De Becker refused to entertain the idea that safe rooms reflect or trigger paranoia. "Practicality and caution are the only issues," he wrote in an e-mail. "Paranoid people go to therapists. At-risk individuals are advised by our firm."

For the panic rooms he's worked on, "Several tradesmen are involved so no one company ever has all the knowledge. Some clients have the safe rooms removed when they sell a home, so that no sensitive technical information is available to anyone." (In the film, one of the burglars is a worker who helped build the room).

If it weren't for the secrecy factor, it would be easier for academics like Ellin to write off the safe room trend as a status symbol, like a tennis court or home theatre. But their existence, she said, stems from something deeper. "They are an indicator that perception of fear is really high and yet they really give a false sense of security," she said. "It's the same as living in a gated community. . . I wonder about the message a safe room sends to children." O'Leary, however, said there's good reason to fear random acts of violence. "House invasions are a reality," he said. "The question you have to ask is, what reasonable methods do you employ to safeguard against that risk. What might be reasonable for one would not be the same for, say, Prince." (The pop singer reportedly has purchased a place on the Bridle Path, but O'Leary said Prince is not his safe-room client.)

Ellin hopes that panic rooms do not follow the taste for gated communities in eventually crossing income and racial divides. "I'm hoping it's a hysterical blip," she said. . "Since the 1970's, the acceleration of change and technology has been so great, and that's what's behind our anxiety. We have less control. We can't fix stuff ourselves anymore. And it makes us fearful, of everything and of nothing."

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