State-of-the-art panic rooms are the hot new trend for billionaires

BILLIONAIRES are outfitting their abodes with ultra-luxe panic rooms to protect against everything from natural disasters to terror attacks.

Jodie Foster with Kristen Stewart in scene from the film Panic Room.

THE hottest new trend for the .01 per cent? Safe rooms, darling.

Billionaires are outfitting their abodes with ultra-luxe safe spaces that cost up to half a million dollars, according to a Town & Country story in the September issue of the glossy.

The shelters are designed to protect against everything from natural disasters to home invasions and Islamic State attacks, and come complete with infra-red cameras, facial recognition software for entry, ballistic fibreglass to protect against explosions, air filtration units and bad-guy-distracting fog that’s activated with the touch of a button.

“They may want a facility that’s nuclear-proof, but they also want it to look like a Ritz-Carlton,” Lana Corbi tells T&C. She and her husband run the security firm Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments.

Odd Mom Out creator and star Jill Kargman says, “It becomes a competition at dinner parties … who has what state-of-the-art hazmat suits, and kits where you can drink your own pee, et cetera. When I saw Showtime’s Billions I died laughing that they had millions in bearer bonds just as go money [set away in a safe room].

“People love to say how much go money they have.”

James Keogh, a Douglas Elliman broker, is currently repping a Hamptons house on sale for mid-seven figures that boasts a panic room. There’s a $US24.9 million ($32.5 million) Tribeca pad on the market that includes a safe room among its 6500 square feet. And Sotheby’s Jean Bateman has a listing for a 4000-square-foot Dallas home that has a putting green, four-car garage, outdoor cook station and a reinforced shelter — naturally.

“It’s certainly a bonus,” Ms Batemen tells Town & Country.

And trust us, these aren’t the minimalist fallout shelters of the 1960s or the lead-lined bomb shelter that hedge fund honcho Bruce Kovner infamously built in his Manhattan townhouse in 2002.

Tom Gaffney, founder of Gaffco Ballistics, works with families in the Hamptons, Manhattan, South Florida and Connecticut to create the six-figure fortifications of their dreams — or their nightmares.

As he explains: “In the high-end residential market, they don’t expect to see a Jodie Foster-style safe room.”

This article originally appeared in New York Post and was reproduced with permission.