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.
Download the CTV News App for breaking news alerts and video on all the top stories “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 capabl.