SAFE HOUSE High-end 'Panic Room' hideouts becoming more common

Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, April 8, 2002

Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one Batcave.

Her secret hideout is behind a seamless wall in her one-story ranch house in rural Livermore. A robber could break in, check every room and never know she's a few feet away, calling authorities as she loads a handgun.

Milani is one of the hundreds of Bay Area residents who have a real-life "panic room," which real estate insiders used to call safe rooms before the hit movie starring Jodie Foster came out.

Some are converted closets with doors that bolt shut from the inside. Others are like Milani's -- with secret entrances that are impossible to detect unless you know where they are.

And a few are similar to Foster's fortresslike hideout in "Panic Room," or even more intricate, with heat-sensing cameras, multiple ventilation systems and chemical washbasins for scrubbing away biohazards.

In Los Angeles, most A-list celebrities and entertainment executives have safe rooms, said Bill Rigdon, who is a vice president of Building Consensus, a Los Angeles company that builds the hideaways.

He said Bay Area safe-room owners are a little less conspicuous.

"It's the guy who owns the grocery store chain, software people, an owner of several hundred business franchises," said Rigdon, who has built more than a dozen safe rooms from San Jose to Marin County. "During the next fiasco, where do you want to be?"

In "Panic Room," Jodie Foster's character and her daughter are accosted by three bumbling thieves.

Mother and daughter hide in a large armored space with security cameras, a toilet and enough provisions to stay put for weeks -- as the bad guys use a Home Depot franchise's worth of tools to try to break in.

Al Corbi, who has been designing safe rooms since 1971 with The Designers in Los Angeles, said the makers of "Panic Room" got it right.

"The movie is dead accurate, but what's interesting is you're looking at a 30-year-old safe room," Corbi said. "They don't look like that at all anymore."

The "Panic Room" safe room is encased in several feet of concrete and steel.

Modern builders use sealed Kevlar, plastics and other light materials.

"Thirty years ago, you could only put one of these things on the ground floor, unless the building (was made of) reinforced concrete," Corbi said. "Nowadays you can put them anyplace you want, cost-effectively."

Corbi said the eight black-and-white security monitors in "Panic Room" would be replaced by one computer with split screens. And Rigdon said the cameras themselves, which are visible in the movie, would be camouflaged.

"Our cameras, you would never know they're there," Rigdon said.

In "Panic Room," Foster breathed the same air as her attackers. Modern safe rooms have several filtered ventilation systems to keep occupants safe from smallpox, anthrax or other biological weapons.

Interest in home safety goes through cycles. The bomb shelters of the 1950s became passe, making way for safe rooms in the 1970s.

And Corbi said safe rooms are becoming obsolete. Most new high-end homes are designed with safe "cores," in which an entire section or even the floor where the occupants sleep is cut off from the rest of the residence.

"If someone wants to get into the house, they can get into the house," Corbi said. "(But) with a safe core, they can't get near you."

Some Los Angeles safe rooms border on excessive -- Rigdon talks about the Sultan of Brunei's plans for a 100,000-square-foot underground hideout. But designers say they are becoming more affordable.

Corbi said he's created a safe core in a home for $15,000, and is serving more middle-class homes.

Milani's safe room isn't as tricked out as the one in "Panic Room," but any crook with self-preservation in mind would move on to the next address anyway.

While Foster's room was filled with snacks and blankets, Milani's looks like a weapons factory. On a recent Friday, she had two rifles, two handguns, pepper spray and enough ammunition to quell the next 10 prison riots at Pelican Bay.

If Milani were the protagonist in "Panic Room," the movie would have been about five minutes long.

"They had less firepower in the movie," she said, hefting a small Beretta handgun. "My theory is, pepper spray in my left hand and gun in my right."

Not that Milani wants it to happen. She was a businesswoman in Silicon Valley but cashed it all in for her 30-acre ranch, hoping to bring in kids with autism, Down syndrome and other special needs to ride horses.

Milani set up a different safe room in an old house in Fremont after a young niece asked what they would do if a burglar broke in.

"My nieces and nephews all know about it now," she said. "My thought process was, what am I going to do with these little lives?"

She had no idea her Livermore house had a safe room until it was in escrow. For safety reasons, real estate agents tend to hide the location until they know a buyer is serious.

"You have to kind of gauge it," said Isaac Rodriguez, a Danville real estate agent who has sold three homes with safe rooms in the past 14 months. "Are they neighbors? Or just looking around?"

While Rigdon said his company had a large increase in business after Sept. 11, Rodriguez said Bay Area buyers weren't asking him about safe rooms until after the trailers for "Panic Room" started rolling a few months ago.

Now he gets four or five calls a week and is advising custom home builders to plan for a safe room.

"I tell them whatever you do, put one in," Rodriguez said. "It's going to be a good selling point."

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2002

Answers

I'd much rather have a hidden emergency exit.

There are too many things that can go wrong with staying in a house, plus robbers, etc., don't expect to be shot as they are leaving.

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2002